Italo Calvino
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) was an Italian writer and novelist. 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).
His style defies easy classification; much of his writing has an air of light fantasy reminiscent of fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), but sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation ("Difficult Loves", for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". Twelve years before his death, he was invited to and joined the Oulipo group of experimental writers. He wrote: "my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
Bibliography
(dates are of original publication)
- The Path to the Nest of Spiders (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947)
- Ultimo viene il corvo (1949)
- I giovani del Po (1951)
- The Cloven Viscount (Il Visconte dimezzato, 1951)
- The Argentine Ant (La formica Argentina, 1952)
- L'entrata in guerra (1954)
- Italian Folktales (Fiabe Italiane, 1956, retelling of traditional stories)
- La panchina (1956, libretto for the opera by Sergio Liberovici)
- La nuvola di smog (1958)
- I racconti (1958)
- The Baron in the Trees (Il barone rampante, 1957)
- The Nonexistent Knight (Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959)
- Our Ancestors (I nostri antenati, 1959, collection of Il cavaliere inesistente, Il Visconte dimezzato and Il barone rampante)
- Marcovaldo (1963)
- The Watcher (La giornata di uno scrutatore, 1963)
- La speculazione edilizia (1963)
- Cosmicomics (Cosmicomiche, 1965)
- t zero (Ti con zero, 1967)
- Difficult Loves (Gli amori difficili, 1970, stories from the 1940s and 1950s)
- Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili, 1972)
- The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Il castello dei destini incrociati, 1973)
- Il nome, il naso (1973)
- Autobiografia di uno spettatore (1974)
- La corsa delle giraffe (1975)
- The Watcher and other stories (1963, short story collection)
- If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, 1979) (English translation ISBN 0-919630-23-5)
- The Uses of Literature (1980, 1982, essays)
- La vera storia (1982, libretto for the opera by Luciano Berio)
- Mr. Palomar - Palomar (1983)
- Fantastic Stories (Racconti Fantastici Dell'Ottocento, two volumes, 1983)
- Science et métaphore chez Galilée (1983, lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes de la Sorbonne)
- Collezione di sabbia (1984, essays)
Posthumous editions:
- Under the Jaguar Sun (Sotto il sole giaguaro, 1988, short story collection)
- Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Lezioni americane, 1988, lectures)
- The Road to San Giovanni (La strada di San Giovanni, 1990, autobiographical stories)
- Why Read the Classics? (Perché Leggere i Classici, 1991, essays)
- Numbers in the Dark (1993)
- Hermit in Paris (2003, autobiographical writings)
