Under the Jaguar Sun
A King Listens
The Name, the Nose
Note
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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Italo Calvino, one of Italy’s foremost writers, was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. When the Germans occupied northern Italy during the Second World War, he joined the partisans. The novel that resulted from this experience, published in English under the title The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, won wide acclaim. Best known for his experimental masterpieces Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino was also a brilliant exponent of allegorical fantasy in such works as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, The Complete Cosmicomics, and the trilogy Our Ancestors, comprising The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees and The Non-Existent Knight. An essayist, journalist and the author of many stories, Calvino won the prestigious Italian literary award, the Premio Feltrinelli, in 1973. Eighteen of his books have been published in English.
The New Statesman said, ‘Calvino cannot be defined within our existing terms … his is a voice which cries out the need to rehabilitate ourselves to our books, our lives, our world’ and Time called him ‘Quite possibly the best Italian novelist alive, one of those storytellers who hold a mirror up to nature and then write about the mirror.’
Italo Calvino died in September 1985, aged sixty-two.