One of modern Italy's most important men of letters, Italo Calvino (1923-1985), blended fantasy, fable, and comedy in an effort to illuminate modern life, and in the process redefined the literary forms. Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923. His...

Italo Calvino has long been recognized as one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century. At once experimental and accessible, he is able to fuse sophisticated narrative techniques with pleasurable storytelling. His writing, internationally...

"After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work," Italian novelist and short story writer Italo Calvino announced in his Six...

When Italo Calvino died in 1985 at the age of sixty-two, he was working on a series of six essays to be delivered at Harvard University under the auspices of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Calvino completed only five of the essays, which...

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The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. W.W. Norton, 252 pages, $23.95.There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid....

In the following essay, Biasin focuses on the function of food in Calvino's work, particularly his story “Sotto il sole giaguaro.”

In the following essay, Porush evaluates the impact of recent scientific developments—particularly the growth of cybernetics and postmodern scientific thought—on Calvino's work.

In the following essay from her full-length study of Calvino's work, Adler organizes his fantasy stories into classifications, emphasizing the “wide spectrum of fanciful variations of each one of these categories.”