Monday, November 21, 2005

Italo Calvino

"Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade."
Italo Calvino- If On a Lonely Winter's Night a Traveler

Pop culture guru and novelist Jonathan Lethem's (Motherless Brooklyn) essay in last Sunday's NY Times Book Review is a good introduction to the works of Italo Calvino . I have only read one Calvino title, Invisible Cities, which had been recommended to me after reading Marco Polo's Travels for a Medieval Travel Literature class. Calvino's book mesmerized me and introduced me to the possibilities of the novel.

"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, The New York Review of Books

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