The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays

＂Wonderful... Calvino’s prose is sparkling as ever, and he approaches ideas with wit and an open mind, always ready to challenge a stale point of view. This anthology will delight Calvino fans old and new.＂ --Publishers Weekly

A rich collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of Calvino’s approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature.

An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit of prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world. From classics to contemporary literature, from tradition to the avant-garde, Calvino masterfully explores reading, writing, and translating through careful and illuminating discussion of the works of Bakhtin, Brecht, Cortázar, Thomas Mann, Octavio Paz, Georges Perec, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, and more. Drawn from Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto (2002), Sulla fiaba (1988), and other uncollected essays, this volume of previously untranslated work--now rendered in English by acclaimed translator Ann Goldstein--is a major statement in literary criticism.

Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was born in Cuba and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He was a member of the partisan movement during the German occupation of northern Italy in World War II. The novel that resulted from that experience, published in English as The Path to the Nest of Spiders, won widespread acclaim. His other works of fiction include The Baron in the Trees, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Cosmicomics, Difficult Loves, If on a winter’s night a traveler..., Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, Mr. Palomar, The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount, Under the Jaguar Sun, and The Watchers and Other Stories. His other works include Six Memos for the Next Millennium, The Uses of Literature, collections of literary essays, and the anthologies Italian Folktales and Fantastical Tales. At the time of his death, in Siena at age 61, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer.