/lit/ - Literature

Calvino was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death in 1985

His best-known works include

the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959)
>The Cloven Viscount (1952), The Baron in the Trees (1957), and The Nonexistent Knight (1959).

the Cosmicomics ("Le cosmicomiche") collection of short stories (1965)
>Each story takes a scientific theory, and builds an imaginative story around it. An always-extant being called Qfwfq explicitly narrates all of the stories save two. Every story is a memory of an event in the history of the universe.

Invisible Cities (1972)
>The book is framed as a conversation between the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, and Marco Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as commentary on culture, language, time, memory, death, or human experience generally.

If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
>Calvino stated If on a winter's night a traveler was "clearly" influenced by the writings of Vladimir Nabokov.
>Author David Mitchell described himself as being "magnetised" by the book from its start when he read it as an undergraduate, but on rereading it, felt it had aged and that he did not find it "breathtakingly inventive" as he had the first time, yet does stress that "however breathtakingly inventive a book is, it is only breathtakingly inventive once" – with once being better than never.
>Sting named his 2009 album If on a Winter's Night... after the book