Italo Calvino

Reading lists

Where to start reading Italo Calvino

Italo-Calvino-Why-we-read-the-Classics_Hero-Desktop_Penguin-1

Features

Why read the classics?

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

A special edition of the classic genre-defying novel

A beautiful hardback edition of Calvino's genre-switching masterwork. A book of surprise and adventure but you, the reader, are the hero. 
 
You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. 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. But the real hero is you, the reader. 
 
'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell 
 
'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian 
 
VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

Marcovaldo

Calvino is surely among the handful of living writers that can be called, without hesitation, great. Each book by Calvino is a completely original conception. Marcovaldo is one of the best works of fiction published

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century

It is the refinement, the oddness and the humour of the thoughts he gets which make Calvino a rare pleasure to read; he is a match for Borges as he stealthily patrols the limits of the unthinkable

He will continue to glitter, this strange, lonely prospector in the universe of words, well into the next millennium and after, a master in the empire of the imagination

What is so much admired by the readers of Mr. Calvino's later Invisible Cities was already at work in Marcovaldo and with a more cogent narrative drive... Marcovaldo conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life

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. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems. 
 
'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer 
 
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Our Ancestors

Calvino's refusal to be glum set him apart from other modernists. His marvellous Fifties trilogy, Our Ancestors, brought us allegorical fables about a cloven viscount, a non-existent knight and a baron who swings from the trees

Calvino's genius lies not so much in this tantalising conceit, but the brilliance and ingenuity with which he pulls it off...A dazzling display of literary fireworks

The writing is just breathtaking and the final story, 'The Non-Existent Knight', still sends a shiver up my spine

Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries, as they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place but learnt how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends

One of the greatest tale-spinners of modern times

A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction

Italo Calvino (Author, Introducer) 
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.

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

Mr Palomar

Here, Calvino, probably Italy's leading novelist before he died, focuses a probing eye on one man's attempt to name the parts of his universe, almost as though Mr Palomar were trying to define and explain his own existence. Where the Palomar telescope points out into space, Mr Palomar points in: walking the beach, visiting the zoo, strolling in his garden. Each brief chapter reads like an exploded haiku, with Mr Palomar reading an universe into the proverbial grain of sand

Beautifully nimble, solitary feats of imagination

Calvino represents a high point of literary evolution; his skill is immense but retains a simian agility. As ever, his gaze is crystal clear and his writing has the easy beauty of clarity.

Mr Palomar is a delightful eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things. He is seeking knowledge; 'it is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath'. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of migrant starlings, Mr Palomar's observations render the world afresh. 
 
'Beautifully nimble, solitary feats of imagination' Seamus Heaney 
 
'Beguiling' Time

Difficult Loves and Other Stories

A beautifully translated collection of early stories by the highly regarded Italian writer. The earliest were written in 1945 when Calvino was twenty-two and the latest date from the 1950s when he was in his early thirties. The quirkiness and the grace of the writing, the originality of the imagination at work, the incandescence of vision, make this collection well worth reading, and for more than archaeological reasons

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. As well as the thirteen tales from his Difficult Loves collection this volume also includes 'Smog', 'A Plunge into Real Estate' and 'The Argentine Ant'. 
 
'The quirkiness and grace of the writing, the originality of the imagination at work, the occasional incandescence of vision, and a certain loveable nuttiness make this collection well worth reading' Margaret Atwood 
 
'If this is not a masterpiece of twentieth-century prose writing, I cannot think of anything better' Gore Vidal on 'The Argentine Ant'

Last Comes the Raven

In these beautifully translated stories, the quality of the writing emerges as clearly as do the ease and range of his inventiveness. Calvino's special gift is to link the physical and immediate with an allegorical timelessness. All the characters and creatures in these stories conspire to convey a feeling of the wonder, mystery and terror of life

Calvino's strength is his economy and subtlety. The best of his allegorical fantasies have the power of the Brothers Grimm, rollicking stories on the surface, with an underlying savagery

Calvino was drawn to narratives as pure and potent objects; in this collection, he examines but does not deconstruct them . . . There is the author's trademark ironic distance and careful wit, as well as tinges of surrealism. But, where the mature Calvino found a style that was supremely arch, alien, and spare, his more mimetic stories retain the funk of the human . . . The reader of Last Comes the Raven registers a bloom of social feelings: sympathy, recognition, curiosity

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.

These early short stories brim with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, telling tales both sumptuous and unnerving. 
 
Calvino's war-torn Italy is vivid, intense, almost hyper-real. A trio of greedy burglars rob a pastry shop, a boy offers a girl presents of toads and insects from the garden, a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In every story he reveals the hidden meaning beneath the surface of everyday life, and the ludicrousness of war. 
 
Some stories from Last Comes the Raven have been previously available in the collection Adam, One Afternoon. This new expanded collection includes several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein and is an important addition to Calvino's legacy. 
 
'In Last Comes the Raven, a collection of early stories, we find the man behind the magician' New Yorker

William Weaver

I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun – into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the king-priest … The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll; I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun

Under the Jaguar Sun

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Kate-Atkinson

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

prhuk-authors

Discover the Penguin books that shaped us

Brief Encounters

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

Little Clothbound Classics

Penguin Archive

Penguin Great Ideas

Penguin Modern

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Italo Calvino

Books by Italo Calvino

Series by Italo Calvino

Brief Encounters

Articles featuring Italo Calvino

Where to start reading Italo Calvino

Why read the classics?

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter