Architect of scrupulously imagined, apparently fantastic, insidiously plausible words, [Italo Calvino] occupies a literary space somewhere east of Borges and west of Nabokov. (p. 1)

In "If on a winter's night a traveler," he makes one story after another disappear….

Surprise is part of the pleasure of this book, and I won't tell the story of its several failing and successful quests. Let me just say that Ludmilla and the Reader…. [run across] novels of different origins—Japan, Latin America, Belgium, Ireland and three imaginary countries—and that all of these novels are interrupted for one reason or another: a further error of binding, suicide of the author, theft of the book, a sudden arrest.

Some of these books read like delicate parodies…. Others read like eerily filtered descriptions of acts of reading…. (p. 24)

[The] book is both vividly written … and thoroughly aware of "the immensity of the nonwritten...