“... books that do not exist, often with bibliographical exactness: it continues in the fictions of Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams, Roberto Bolaño and Mark Z. Danielewski, among many others. The Polish science fiction writer and author of Solaris, Stanisław Lem, wrote long introductions to four imaginary books in Imaginary Magnitude (1973) and a whole ...”

“... for guru – ‘but something like the master of a workshop, a master worker, a master artisan’. Italo Calvino said Barthes’s field was the science of the single object, the art of generalising where only the particular was in play. This was ‘the great thing that he – I do not say taught us, because one can neither teach nor learn this – but ...”

“... the Oulipo were some of the most illustrious names in European literature: Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino. Their goal was to revitalise literature via gamesmanship, and to create new forms using mathematical methods. Mathews was awed to be in such company but alert to the elitist and sexist optics. ‘Literature and game playing, literature as game ...”

“... Themersons courted J.B. Priestley but he failed to deliver; Edwin Morgan had his poetry rejected; Italo Calvino called in on the couple; B.S. Johnson invited Stefan to the Writers’ Co-Operative. The correspondence file bulges in surprising places, in large part thanks to Stefan’s habit of sending comp copies to anyone who might be interested. Kathy ...”

“... in a word, macho. The Calvinosaurus comes to us neither from the Protestant theologian nor from Italo Calvino (who wrote a wonderful story about dinos), but from the fantasised macho alter ego of Calvin in the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes: bigger than his parents and named after himself (as Andrew Carnegie named the Diplodocus Carnegii). As for the other ...”

“... tours of French restaurants with his editor Jason Epstein, conversations with his Roman neighbour Italo Calvino, lunch with E.M. Forster, chat with Princess Margaret. But in Rome there were only months of reading, and Old Glory. Few people have identified themselves as closely with the history of their own country as Vidal has – General de Gaulle ...”

“... life’. She begins with an observation about differences between two specific male tellers, Italo Calvino (who ‘reveals the porousness of stories to their tellers’ temper and beliefs’ and whose telling is ‘bright with energetic rebellion and peasant cunning’) and the Grimms (‘eerie, volatile, and curiously unfocused socially and ...”

“... the hallway and the dining room, she was all smiles.’ This zigzag pattern of events, which Italo Calvino identified as a feature of folktales, creates ‘incessant motion’ within a restricted space. Play is more real here than reality: three pages are dedicated to the governesses’ game of pretending to leave ‘just to stir up the ...”

“... most influential 20th-century fictions. It was one of the components in the authorial persona of Italo Calvino (who collected Italian folk tales), and fed into the many-personaed slipperiness of Borges’s fictions. The voice of the ‘folk’ – the ‘authentic’ voice of an oral storyteller, who might be from a lower social class than the author ...”

“... with the world. The capacity to make things up is a way of thinking. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino says he scrutinises the darkness so he can pick out the pinpricks of light – potential fields of inquiry. Echoing this, Mahmoud Darwish once said that ‘a poem is a throw of dice on a patch of darkness.’ Rebecca Elson, an astronomer who ...”

“... further ironies are possible, further mischief is possible ... ’ It sounds like something from Italo Calvino: a narrative fantasy in a hall of mirrors. But, in Quoof, Muldoon has achieved his object. Though every poem is distinct and ‘intact’, each text in the book relates to its successor through a word, a theme or metaphor, while the concluding ...”

“... In​ Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller the protagonist encounters two sisters who have different styles of reading. Ludmilla reads for pleasure, unencumbered by academic-literary-critical goggles, delighting in writers who write as ‘a pumpkin plant produces pumpkins’. Lotaria, on the other hand, is an academic who reads books ‘only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them ...”

“... he might gain from it the halo of a victim,’ an Italian insider told the young literary editor Italo Calvino. It’s not that Pasternak hadn’t been courageous – there are numerous acts of selfless, indeed reckless concern for others – and he surely didn’t deserve to be saddled with a bad conscience. But in his ‘yielding himself up’ there ...”

“... prestige as a champion and practitioner of the nouveau roman: an influence on Perec and Modiano, Calvino and Cortázar; the darling of the avant-garde literary journal Tel Quel. Grove’s combined edition of La Jalousie and Dans le labyrinthe sold forty thousand copies in the US, where Robbe-Grillet was taken on a widely publicised tour of ‘forty ...”

“... a byword for bien-pensant civics lessons and sententious moralism.In the early 1970s, however, Italo Calvino ‘rediscovered’ one of his late novels, Amore e ginnastica, praising its erotic mordancy. Then in 1980, the manuscript of a novel De Amicis had written nearly a hundred years earlier, but had left in a drawer, was published. Its title was ...”