Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and journalist. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
Cosmicomics is a collection of twelve short stories by Italo Calvino first published in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. The stories were originally published between 1964 and 1965 in the Italian periodicals Il Caffè and Il Giorno. Each story takes a scientific "fact", and builds an imaginative story around it. An always-extant being called Qfwfq narrates all of the stories save two. Every story is a memory of an event in the history of the universe. Qfwfq also narrates some stories in Calvino's t zero.
If on a winter's night a traveler is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book they are reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader ("you") finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones. The book was published in an English translation by William Weaver in 1981.
William Fense Weaver was an English language translator of modern Italian literature.
Timothy Harold Parks is a British novelist, author of nonfiction, translator from Italian to English, and professor of literature.
Qfwfq is the narrator of many stories appearing in several works by Italian author Italo Calvino.
Under the Jaguar Sun is a collection of three short stories by Italo Calvino. The stories were to have been in a book entitled I cinque sensi. Calvino died before writing the stories dedicated to vision and touch. In the Italian edition the stories are ordered as follows: Il nome, il naso; Sotto il sole giaguaro; and Un re in ascolto. The titular story Sotto il sole giaguaro was originally published as Sapore sapere in the June 1982 edition of FMR, an Italian magazine.
Andrea De Carlo is an Italian novelist. He has published almost two dozen novels, many of which have been translated.
The Baron in the Trees is a 1957 novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. Described as a conte philosophique and a metaphor for independence, it tells the adventures of a boy who climbs up a tree to spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom. Calvino published a new version of the novel in 1959.
Marcovaldo is a collection of 20 short stories written by Italo Calvino. It was initially published, in 1963, as Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città. The first stories were written in the early 1950s.
Giorgio Manganelli was an Italian journalist, avant-garde writer, translator and literary critic. A native of Milan, he was one of the leaders of the avant-garde literary movement in Italy in the 1960s, Gruppo 63. He was a baroque and expressionist writer. Manganelli translated Edgar Allan Poe's complete stories and authors like T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Eric Ambler, O. Henry, Ezra Pound, Robert Louis Stevenson, Byron's Manfred and others into Italian. He published an experimental work of fiction, Hilarotragoedia, in 1964, at the time he was a member of the avant-garde Gruppo 63. Centuria, which won the Viareggio Prize is probably his most approachable; it was translated into English in 2005 by Henry Martin. Agli dei ulteriori comprises a linked collection of short pieces including an exchange of letters between Hamlet and the Princess of Cleves and concludes with a fake learned article on the language of the dead. He died in Rome in 1990. He was an atheist. Italo Calvino called him ' a writer unlike any other, an inexhaustible and irresistible inventor in the game of language and ideas'.
t zero is a 1967 collection of short stories by Italian author Italo Calvino. The title story is based on a particularly uncertain moment in the life of a lion hunter. This second in time, t0, is considered by the hunter against known previous seconds and hypothetical future seconds
Martin L. McLaughlin is Professor of Italian and Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College. In addition to his published academic results he is the English translator of Umberto Eco's On Literature and Italo Calvino's Hermit in Paris.
The Nonexistent Knight is an allegorical fantasy novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino, first published in Italian in 1959 and in English translation in 1962.
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or particularly noteworthy. What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Classics?" and "What Is a Classic?" have been essayed by authors from different genres and eras. The ability of a classic book to be reinterpreted, to seemingly be renewed in the interests of generations of readers succeeding its creation, is a theme that is seen in the writings of literary critics including Michael Dirda, Ezra Pound, and Sainte-Beuve. These books can be published as a collection or presented as a list, such as Harold Bloom's list of books that constitute the Western canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas.
"The Burning of the Abominable House" is a short story by the Italian novelist Italo Calvino. It can be considered an experiment of computer-aided literature, where the techniques of combinatorics and constraint-based writing developed by the French writers' gathering Oulipo are applied to the narrative structure rather than just to the syntactic arrangement of a text.
The John Florio Prize for Italian translation is awarded by the Society of Authors, with the co-sponsorship of the Italian Cultural Institute and Arts Council England. Named after the Tudor Anglo-Italian writer-translator John Florio, the prize was established in 1963. As of 1980 it is awarded biannually for the best English translation of a full-length work of literary merit and general interest from Italian.
Archibald Colquhoun (1912–1964) was a leading translator of modern Italian literature into English. He studied at Ampleforth College, Oxford University, and the Royal College of Art. Originally a painter, he worked as director of the British Institute in Naples before the Second World War, and in Seville after the war. He worked in British intelligence during wartime. He later headed Oxford University Press' initiative to bring out Italian literary classics in translation. He scored his biggest success with Lampedusa's The Leopard, a translation that is still in print. He was also one of the first translators to introduce Italo Calvino to Anglophone readers. He was the first winner of the PEN Translation Prize, which he won for his translation of Federico de Roberto's The Viceroys. He also wrote a biography of Alessandro Manzoni.
