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.”

In the following essay, Weiss investigates Calvino's treatment of the individual and society in The Argentine Ant, A Plunge into Real Estate, Smog, and The Watcher.

In the following analysis of I racconti, Woodhouse shows how alienation is one of the dominant themes in Calvino's fiction.

In the following essay, Ricci views the stories in I racconti as Calvino's early narrative experiments.

In the following essay, Ricci discusses the defining characteristics of the stories comprising I racconti, asserting that the unifying theme of the collection is “the journey of man from a position of communion with the world, in the early tales, towards an existential and hermetic solitude in the final novellas.”

In the following essay, Byrne contends that “controversial though the tales may be, Our Ancestors makes an important contribution to modern literature.”

In the following essay, White places Calvino's short fiction within the context of postmodern literature.

In the following essay, Carter asserts that realistic and fantastic elements interrelate and act as reinforcing literary modes in “Ultimo Viene il Corvo.”

In the essay below, Cannon uses the stories in Calvino's posthumous collection to support her ideas concerning his approach to, and aspirations for, writing and literature in general.

In the following essay, Fenwick explores issues of personal identity, sexual reproduction, and genetic continuity in “Meiosis.”

In the following essay, Friedman examines Calvino's absurdist concept of time in the short stories “t zero,” “The Chase,” and “The Night Driver.”

[Calvino's] "message" for mankind seems to be to create a society in which the impediments of convention, taboo, inhibition are removed so that the individual can be a contented member of a society of equally contented, uninhibited individuals. Above all, Calvino seems to emphasise the merits of the wholesome, uninhibited individual. (p. 39) The individual has to develop his own personality. He has to overcome obstacles, satisfy his curiousity about the unknown, and refuse to accept unq...

[From] a very early stage in his career Calvino seeme to have been daunted by geometric compulsions…. The minute details of his plots, the main events of his stories, the structure of his novels, even the most extravagant flights of his imagination are always arranged in a binary literary order. In the first Goyesque chapter of The Cloven Viscount … the massacre is presented in geometric patterns: here the dead horses, there the dead men. The Viscount is cloven by a cannon ball into two Steven...

Does an Italian equivalent of Grimms's Fairy Tales exist? Italo Calvino began his research into Italian folktales with that question in mind. When it became clear that there was no "readable master collection of Italian folktales which would be popular in every sense of the word," Calvino himself assumed the work of assembling one. It was a Herculean undertaking. Calvino collated, categorized, and compared "mountains of narratives." His work had two objectives, he tells us...

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….