In Difficult Loves, Italy’s master storyteller weaves tales in which cherished deceptions and illusions of love—including self-love—are swept away in magical instants of recognition. A soldier is reduced to quivering fear by the presence of a full-figured woman in his train compartment; a young clerk leaves a lady’s bed at dawn; a young woman is isolated from bathers on a beach by the loss of her bikini bottom. Each of them discovers hidden truths beneath the surface of everyday life.
This is the first edition in English to present the collection as Calvino originally envisioned it, and includes two stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein.

'Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.'
Science and fiction interweave delightfully in these playful Cosmicomic short stories.

Mr. Palomar is a delightful eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things. He is seeking knowledge; 'it is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath'. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of migrant starlings, Mr. Palomar's observations render the world afresh.

Set in the time of Charlemagne and narrated by a nun with her own secrets to keep, The Nonexistent Knight tells the story of Agilulf, a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. A challenge to his honor sends Agilulf on a search through France, England, and North Africa to confirm the chastity of a virgin he saved from rape years earlier. In the end, after many surprising turns of plot, a closing confession draws this sparkling novella to a perfect finish.

This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a winter's night a traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino's life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino translator Martin McLaughlin. The letters are filled with insights about Calvino's writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics. The book also provides a kind of autobiography, documenting Calvino's Communism and his resignation from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980), and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara). Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist Resistance. This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer at work.

Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno è il primo romanzo di Italo Calvino. Pubblicato nel 1947, è ambientato in Liguria all'epoca della seconda guerra mondiale e della Resistenza partigiana.

現在是 1985 年，我們和下一輪太平盛世之間只剩十五年的時光。在此刻，我並不覺得新紀元的逼近會引起什麼特別的情緒。但我並不想在這裡討論未來學，而是要談文學。
目前這一輪即將終了的太平盛世，目睹現代西方語言的誕生與發展，在文學方面則呈現了這些語言在表現、認知、想像等方面的可能性。這也是書籍的太平盛世，在這一千年中，書籍以我們目前熟悉的形式出現。我們常納悶，文學和書籍在所謂的後工業科技時代會有什麼下場──這樣的關注，或許就是一徵兆，表示目前這個太平盛世的完結。但我並不太喜歡沉溺於這種思考。我對文學的未來有信心，因為我知道有些東西是唯獨文學才能提供給我們的。因此我希望把這些講稿獻給我衷心認同的某些價值、質素或文學特性，設法將它們置入下一輪太平盛世的視野之中。缺的文學價值。
第一講「輕」，引述希臘神話、歐維德、薄伽丘、塞萬提斯、昆德拉、卡夫卡等等作品來詮釋：生命存在的沉重必須以輕盈的態式來承擔；第二講「快」，闡述如何以敏捷來融合「行動」（快）和「沉思默想」（慢）；接下來的第三講「準」，強調語言的精確和明晰；第四講「顯」，說明視覺想像係認識世界和自我的媒介；第五講「繁」是一份展示力作，生動而精彩地描述文學如何逸出常軌，企圖傳達人類面對無限的可能所流露的痛苦、困惑和振奮。

Italo Calvino in Collection of Sand claimed that 'the brain begins in the eye'. The essays collected here display his fascination with the visual universe, in which the things we see tell a truth about the world. With encyclopedic knowledge and engaging curiosity, Calvino writes about such diverse subjects as the imaginative pleasures of maps, bizarre exhibitions and the earliest forms of written language. Books and paintings provoke discussions of artistic motivation, while descriptions of a meticulous Japanese garden, Trajan's column crumbling to dust or a Mexican temple smothered by the jungle lead to contemplations on space, time and civilization.
Surprising and profound, Collection of Sand provides a glimpse into the mind of a master of the magination.

A couple on an epicurean journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him - sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him. And three different men search desperately for the beguiling scents of lost women, from a Count visiting Madame Odile's perfumery, to a London drummer stepping over spent, naked bodies.

"Marcovaldo" is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems.

Compiled by Italo Calvino, one of the essential writers of the twentieth century (and editor of the best-selling Italian Folktales), Fantastic Tales is a rich and wide-ranging collection of twenty-six classic, uncanny tales from the nineteenth century written by an intriguing panoply of European and American authors. Master storyteller himself, Calvino has contributed an informative introduction to the collection, and an engaging précis to each story.
As Calvino writes in Fantastic Tales, which traces the genre from its roots in German Romanticism to the ghost stories of Henry James: "The fantastic tale is one of the most characteristic products of nineteenth-century narrative. For us, it is also one of the most significant. . . . As it relates to our sensibility today, the supernatural element at the heart of these stories always appears freighted with meaning, like the revolt of the unconscious, the repressed, the forgotten. . . . In this we see the modern dimension of the fantastic, the reason for its triumphant resurgence in our times."
Fantastic Tales is a fantastically canonical anthology assembled by an editor who, in the words of Salman Rushdie, "possesses the power of seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams back to life. "
Italo Calvino's works include The Road to San Giovanni, Numbers in the Dark, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, The Baron in the Trees, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Invisible Cities, and Mr. Palomar. Calvino died in 1985.

Suor Teodora narra la storia di Agilulfo, cavaliere senza corpo, di cui vive solo l'armatura. Mentre Carlo Magno assedia Parigi, Agilulfo, dopo essersi coperto di gloria, decide di partire alla ricerca di Sofronia, fanciulla da lui salvata quindici anni prima. Accompagnato dallo scudiero Gurdulù, attraverso numerose peripezie, inseguito dalla guerriera Bradamante innamorata di lui, Agilulfo riesce a trovare Sofronia, ma credendola macchiata di gravi peccati, decide di scomparire. Si sveste dell'armatura e la consegna a Rambaldo, giovane compagno d'armi. Sarà ora questi a proseguire nella bianca corazza, le gesta del cavaliere senza corpo.

Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman's breasts, or a gorilla's behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams-but the results are never the expected ones. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Cover title: Marcovaldo.

Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are thirty-six ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.