(Paperback)

With encyclopedic knowledge, this title writes about such diverse subjects as the imaginative pleasures of maps, bizarre exhibitions and the earliest forms of written language. It provides a glimpse into the mind of a master of the magination.

(Hardback)

(Hardback)

(Paperback)

You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest.

(Paperback)

Meticulously selected and artfully recreated, the selection of stories in Italian is vast and ranges geographically from Corsica and Sicily to Venice and the Alps. Calvino is himself clearly captivated by the folkloric imagination and communicates this in what is a fascinating and rich addition to folk literature.

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider.

(Paperback)

A collection of short stories covering the length of the author's writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. It includes fables; a town where everything has been forbidden apart from the game of tip-cat; and a pitiable tribe watching the flight paths of guided missiles from outside their mud huts.

(Paperback)

Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; These three vivid images are the points of departure for Calvino's classic triptych of moral tales, now published in one volume and all displaying the exuberant talent of a master storyteller.

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

'I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends' Salman Rushdie

From the age of twelve, the Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo makes his home among ash, elm, magnolia, plum and almond, living up in the trees.

(Paperback)

Includes stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures.

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

A couple on a journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him - sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him.

(Paperback)

Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic, this collection provides the author's criticism.

(Paperback)

(Paperback, Revised edition)

Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. This book includes a selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino's life.

(Paperback)

The world of Calvino is a world of fable, but he uses its mechanisms to focus with unerring precision on human reality. Nature in these stories has a magical quality in the flight of a crow, the iridescent track of a snail, the sideways leap of a stray cat - but the magic can encompass both enchantment and terror.

(Paperback)

A spectacular display of this key European writer's early work

This dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino's unique perspective and narrative gifts.

(Paperback)

A collection of nineteenth-century fantastic literature - from enchantments and horrors to subtler, psychological terrors. It includes Hoffmann's "The Sandman", Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Dickens' "The Signal-Man", and works from celebrated writers including Honore de Balzac, Henry James, Sir Walter Scott and Guy de Maupassant.

(Paperback)

Italo Calvino once said that he preferred to give false details about his biography since he felt that even the genuine data of a writer's life shed no light on the creative work. This volume of posthumously collected personal writings is the closest we may ever come to the autobiography of this most private of writers.

(Hardback)

Based on a witty anaolgy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of same book - IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT by Italo Calvino - are constantly and comically frustrated.