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“... for books like this in Italian literature: collections of short pieces by Natalia Ginzburg or Italo Calvino – or Cesare Pavese’s Among Women Only, another novel in which a cool protagonist is both drawn to and repulsed by the intensity of sexual relationships. But the complete immersion in Italian culture evident in Ginzburg, ...”

“... his Kansai terminal. The curator, Terence Riley, took his cue for the show from another Italian, Italo Calvino, who in his last book, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), proclaimed the special virtues of lightness for the new age: ‘I look to science,’ Calvino wrote, ‘to nourish my visions in which all ...”

“... So much for the heroics of De Amicis’s Risorgimento children.In 1952, Rodari wrote to Italo Calvino, then an editor at the Einaudi publishing house, proposing a critical work on Pinocchio. The book’s ‘ties with reality’, he claimed, ‘are deeper and more complex’ than those of Cuore. It captured the child’s ‘need of freedom’ as ...”

“... the Ten Thousand themselves. Readers’ attitudes to the Anabasis often change as they get older. Italo Calvino recalled his schoolboy experience of reading Xenophon as one of great boredom, but later thought he had been wrong to feel this. Yet the view of Xenophon as a simple, uncomplicated author has persisted. ...”

“... and aliens with kings and queens, dragons and monsters. The second Lem sometimes resembles the Italo Calvino of t zero and Cosmicomics, in whom SF riffs are completely subsumed in metaphor. Elsewhere, Lem Two seems to glance back to Swift, Voltaire and Gogol, or sideways to Borges and Pynchon. These are names the SF tradition has often used to ...”

“... he should also give pleasure. Rushdie writes engagingly and lavishly about the comic fantasies of Italo Calvino, author of ‘the most outrageous fiction about fiction ever conceived’, who tells us ‘joyfully, wickedly, that there are things in the world worth loving as well as hating.’ Rushdie’s own novels tap the same vein of surrealistic ...”

“... and reassembles them in attractive, and sometimes new, ways. And that’s how formalism was born. (Italo Calvino, the most exquisite of contemporary formalists, is also, it should be remembered, editor of the classic collection of Italian fairy-tales.) Pavic advises the reader to behave exactly like a traditional storyteller and construct his or her own ...”

“... best of the ghost stories have remained in print. Richly exotic and fanciful, they were admired by Italo Calvino and Isak Dinesen, among others. Calvino’s favourite was ‘Amour Dure’, the story of Medea da Carpi, a Renaissance woman whose beauty destroys those who aspire to love her. ‘A Wicked Voice’, loosely ...”

“... lived to memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the combination of class circumstances ...”

“... A classic,​ according to Italo Calvino, is ‘a book that has never finished saying what it has to say’. I have read Sylvia by Leonard Michaels four or five times and I still don’t feel that I’ve got to the bottom of it. First published in 1992, it is a novel disguised as a memoir, or a memoir disguised as a novel, based on the author’s first marriage, to Sylvia Bloch – a love affair that began in Greenwich Village in 1960 ...”

“... in fact combed earlier collectors’ records, and, like the Brothers Grimm before him and Italo Calvino later, patched and pieced and retold and revoiced the material. During the Soviet era, as Ugrešić has said, the use of traditional material gave writers freedom because it appeared to conform to the populist and nationalist policies of the ...”

“... in Italy was not so much an artistic phenomenon, more a physical, existential, collective need,’ Italo Calvino wrote, revisiting his Neorealist novel The Path to the Spider’s Nests (1947), a child’s-eye view of the partisans. Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), Carlo Levi’s essayistic memoir of his political exile in an impoverished village in ...”

“... from the various parts. This perhaps wilful incompletion (his two best-known novels, according to Italo Calvino, ‘seem to need only a few more pages to reach their conclusions’) goes with a confusion as to the chronology of composition and a concern that the version we hold in our hands is not definitive. First published in book form in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”