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“... At the beginning of Italo Calvino’s first book for six years, an entirely fictional personage named You, the Reader, buys and settles down with a novel which he firmly believes to be the new Calvino. You prepare to recognise the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognise it at all ...”

“... Italo Calvino was born in 1923 and came to prominence in post-war Italy as a writer of neo-realist and politically committed short stories, some of them published in the Communist paper L’Unità. A major social-problem novel set in contemporary Italy was naturally expected of him, but he found himself unable to write it ...”

“... out the visible differences. If it wasn’t for the lion who traditionally accompanies St Jerome, Italo Calvino suggests in The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), you could hardly tell him from St Augustine. Both saints are often pictured as writers, and ‘a man at a desk resembles every other man at a desk.’ By the same token, all writers resemble ...”

“... At ten past three the phone rang. ‘Pronto,’ I said, and the voice answered: ‘I am Signor Calvino.’ It was the novelist Italo Calvino; I was due to interview him later that afternoon. We had scarcely agreed on the place when something hard hit me on the back of the head ...”

“... to emerge from the great novels of the 20th century is the idea of an open encyclopedia,’ wrote Calvino in 1985, the year of his death. Tracing the lineage of the encyclopedic novel through Perec, Mann, Proust and Flaubert, he homes in on the figures of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Robert Musil, two ‘engineer-writers’ who have one quality in common: ‘their ...”

“... Italo Calvino​ has an image problem. He has been pigeonholed as an Italian Queneau or a knock-off Borges. His admirers proselytise – not always helpfully – about The Joy of Semiosis. Reviewers have tried to account for his interest in narrative at both the level of theory and pleasure by calling him a ‘storyteller’, meaning that he wrote books that are both compelling and showily self-aware ...”

“... Like some garrulous character in a story by Italo Calvino, an Italian physician tells of his meeting at a 16th-century siege with a Spaniard who had just lost his nose in a barrack-room brawl. ‘The nose fell in the sand, and I saw it because we were together. So holding it in my hand, all full of sand, I pissed on it, and having washed it with urine I attached it to him and sewed it on very firmly ...”

“... cannot be said of Words in Commotion. Tommaso Landolfi is renowned for his linguistic bravura – Calvino notes in his introduction that he ‘could do whatever he wanted with the pen’ – and Englishing his stories is as much of a challenge as making an Italian of Flann O’Brien. In such a case, half a translation is no better than none at all: ...”

“... it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the sea, starlings, tortoises, Roman rooftops, a girl, giraffes and much else. He wants only to observe, to learn a modest lesson from creatures and things. But he can’t. There is too much to see in ...”

“... pasts and unknowable futures’, in the best tradition of Italy’s two scientific literati, Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. Indeed, the links with Calvino are closer and more meaningful than Pollack probably realises, as I will argue later. First, let me get one complaint off my chest. The text suffers from a ...”

“... instructions, it is not surprising that Oulipo has links to computer science and AI research. Italo Calvino used an algorithm derived from a Greimas square for the composition of his recursive novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller; a ‘Mathews algorithm’, named for its inventor Harry Mathews, consists of generating content by moving sets of ...”

“... is ‘an education for the soul’, what has been the effect on Gert? In The Road to San Giovanni Italo Calvino, who was only a little older and grew up in San Remo, describes his apprenticeship to the cinema as ‘slow and hard’, although it led to a passionate addiction. As a child he was always getting the actors mixed up, particularly if they had ...”

“... track of it altogether. He spends his time getting drunk, having sex and reading Emil Cioran and Italo Calvino. He holds forth on the nature of pavements (‘raised platforms on the side of streets, set aside for people to walk back and forth on … murderers and sheep’). Blasim’s deranged energy is what makes the stories such compulsive fun. In ...”

“... aging funnyman played by Jerry Lewis in his splendid recent film King of Comedy. The stories in Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo (1963), a collection of 20 urban fables occupying a point in his work midway between the massive collection of Italian Folktales (1956) and Invisible Cities (1972), may have conceits allegorically pointed at the times, often ...”

“... do? In the introduction to his anthology of Fantastic Tales, published in the early 1980s, Italo Calvino proposed that the supernatural story emerged as a branch of 18th-century epistemology:The problem of the reality of what we see – both extraordinary things, which may be just hallucinations projected by our minds, and ordinary things, which ...”