Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino, ISBN 9780141189697

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Translated by Patrick Creagh.

With a Note by Esther Calvino

'A rather wonderful little book, full of wit and erudition' Daily Telegraph

Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant pr cis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed.

RRP: $24.95

About the Author: Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba. Both of his parents, Mario and Eva Calvino, were botanists. Calvino moved with his family in Italy in his youth and spent his early years in San Remo, where his father was the curator of the botanical gardens. Between 1941 and 1947 Calvino studied at the University of Turin. In 1940, he was drafted into the Young Fascists and participated in the Italian occupation of the French Riviere, but at the age of nineteen he left and sought refuge in the Alps. There he joined the Communist Resistance in the Ligurian mountains. From these experiences he drew inspiration for his first stories.

From 1959 to 1967 Calvino edited with Elio Vittorini the magazine Il Menab di letteratura. In 1952 he travelled to the Soviet Union and in 1959-60 to the United States. In 1967 he moved to Paris, and then to Rome in 1979. While living in France, Calvino met the Argentinian translator Ester Judith Singer (Chichita), they were married in 1964 in Havanna. Calvino died of cerebral hemorrhage in Siena, on September 19, 1985. His later essays Le lezioni americane were published posthumously. From the collection Under a Jaguar Sun (1991), stories on the five senses, 'sight' and 'touch' were never completed. Calvino works in it around five central qualities of good fiction lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. In The Uses of Literature (1980) Calvino noted that there should be a time "in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same, we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing."

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