Italo Calvino

Difficult Loves is a 1970 short story collection by Italo Calvino. It concerns love and the difficulty of communication. Some published versions of the English translation by William Weaver omit a number of the stories, and also include other Calvino stories about the Second World War and postwar period, including …

The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a 1973 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. Its narrative details a meeting among travelers who are inexplicably unable to speak after traveling through a forest. The characters in the novel recount their tales via Tarot cards, which are reconstructed by the narrator. The novel …

Imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, conjure up cities of magical times. “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant” (Gore Vidal). Translated by William …