Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544133501
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 119
Get Book
Book Description
An empty suit of armor is the hero of this witty novella set in the Early Middle Ages by the acclaimed author of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. As a paladin in the court of Charlemagne, Agilulf is the very embodiment of valor and dedication to duty—but he is also a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. While he has stolen the heart of the female knight Bradamante, she in turn is loved by the young adventurer Rambaldo. When a challenge to Agilulf’s honor sends him on an expedition through France, England, and North Africa, Brandamante and Ramaldo follow close behind. Narrated by a nun with her own secrets to keep, this beloved novella explores the absurdities of medieval knighthood in a series of plot twists that are “executed with brilliance and brio” (Chicago Tribune).
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544231937
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Get Book
Book Description
The complete collection of “nimble and often hilarious” short stories exploring the cosmos by the acclaimed author of Invisible Cities (Colin Dwyer, NPR). Italo Calvino’s beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of a “cosmic know-it-all” with the unpronounceable name of Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Relating complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world, they are an indelible and delightful literary achievement. Originally published in Italian in three separate volumes—including the Asti d’Appello Prize-winning first volume, Cosmicomics—these thirty-four dazzling stories are collected here in one definitive English-language anthology. “Trying to describe such a diverse and entertaining mix, I have to admit, just as Calvino does so often, that my words fail here, too. There’s no way I—or anyone, really—can muster enough of them to quite capture the magic of these stories . . . Read this book, please.” —Colin Dwyer, NPR
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book
Book Description
"Two novellas: the first, a parody of medieval knighthood told by a nun; the second, a fantasy about a nobleman bisected into his good and evil halves. Bravura pieces... executed with brilliance and brio."--Goodreads
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054423104X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 637
Get Book
Book Description
The acclaimed author presents “a rich and wide-ranging anthology” of 19th century fantasy and horror stories—with an original introduction for each (Library Journal). Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of nineteenth-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a twentieth-century master of the speculative. As Calvino explains in his introduction to this collection, “the true theme of the nineteenth-century fantastic tale is the reality of what we see: to believe or not to believe in phantasmagoric apparitions, to glimpse another world, enchanted or infernal, behind everyday appearances.” This anthology of twenty-six enchanting, uncanny, terrifying, and immortally entertaining short stories includes E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp,” and many more, each with a introduction by Calvino. “Impressive and utterly pleasing…Each story [Calvino] picks is absorbing, unique, and continually surprising.”—Los Angeles Times
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544146387
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 121
Get Book
Book Description
"These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino's memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini's army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino's only works of autobiographical fiction. It offers both a glimpse of this writer's extraordinary life and a distilled dram of his wry, ingenious literary voice."--from cover, page [4].
Author: Beno Weiss
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780872498587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Get Book
Book Description
Highlights Calvino's fascination with folk tales, knights, social & political allegories, & science fiction.
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544146468
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Get Book
Book Description
Published for the first time in English, a final collection of essays by the renowned fabulist writer tours the visual world through explorations of subjects ranging from cuneiform and antique maps to Mexican temples and Japanese gardens.
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544133404
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Get Book
Book Description
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." —from If On A Winter's Night a Traveler Italo Calvino's stunning classic imagines a novel capable of endless possibilities in an intricately crafted, spellbinding story about writing and reading. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a feat of striking ingenuity and intelligence, exploring how our reading choices can shape and transform our lives. Originally published in 1979, Italo Calvino's singular novel crafted a postmodern narrative like never seen before—offering not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together, the stories form a labyrinth of literature known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers pursue the story lines that intrigue them and try to read each other. Deeply profound and surprisingly romantic, this classic is a beautiful meditation on the transformative power of reading and the ways we make meaning in our lives. "Calvino is a wizard...There is no halting [this book's] metamorphoses." —New York Times Review of Books
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446419673
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Get Book
Book Description
Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, at the age of twelve, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; Charlemagne's knight, Agiluf, is an empty suit of armour. 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. 'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times
Author: Chinelo Okparanta
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544003454
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Get Book
Book Description
A moving debut story collection centered on Nigerian women, as they build lives out of longing and hope, faith and doubt, the struggle to stay and the mandate to leave, and the burden and strength of love.
