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Difficult Loves
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
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Difficult Loves
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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.
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Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical, and wise, these 34 dazzling stories - collected here in one definitive anthology - relate complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world.
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A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical, and wise, these 34 dazzling stories - collected here in one definitive anthology - relate complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world.
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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.
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This is an AMAZING Book!
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The Cloven Viscount
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In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
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The Written World and the Unwritten World
- Essays
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3
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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.
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In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema, and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language, and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance.
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At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
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Why Read the Classics?
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Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. 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 36 immediately relevant, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.
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Fantastic Tales
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Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a 20th-century master of the speculative.
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Unexpected pleasure
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These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses of taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico's fiery chiles and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun". In "A King Listens", a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant's thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. "The Name, the Nose" drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them.
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Chosen as one of the New York Times's 10 best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists.
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5 out of 5 stars
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At Last: Unbridled Delight
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Personal Writings
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 13
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 11
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Albert Camus (1913-1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Personal Writings brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus's writing career that reflect the scope and depth of his interior life. Grappling with an indifferent mother and an impoverished childhood in Algeria, an ever-present sense of exile, and an ongoing search for equilibrium, Camus's personal essays shed new light on the emotional and experiential foundations of his philosophical thought....
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Pnin
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 141
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
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Publisher's summary
Intricate interior lives are brilliantly explored in these short stories, now presented in one definitive collection as Calvino intended them
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.
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-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 554
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
-
5 out of 5 stars
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The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
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Snow Country
- By: Yasunari Kawabata
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 3 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 276
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 235
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Story4 out of 5 stars 236
The story of the doomed love affair of a wealthy sophisticate, Shimamura, and the geisha Komako, at a mountain hotspring resort in western Japan, one of the snowiest regions on earth.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A beautifully written book
- By just asking for some common sense on 03-19-19
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Night Soldiers
- By: Alan Furst
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 18 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,869
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,533
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,538
New York Times bestselling author Alan Furst is widely recognized as master of the historical spy novel. Furst’s works are vivid evocations of long-forgotten heroes and feature plots that unfold to the inexorable cadence of history. Night Soldiers is a simultaneously thrilling and illuminating tale of espionage set in 1934.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Best Alan Furst novel!
- By Placeholder on 04-27-11
By: Alan Furst
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Pietr the Latvian
- Inspector Maigret, Book 1
- By: Georges Simenon, David Bellos - translator
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 888
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 785
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 784
The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Long live Maigret
- By Adeliese Baumann on 11-19-14
By: Georges Simenon, and others
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Life Class
- By: Pat Barker
- Narrated by: Russell Boulter
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 75
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 50
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 51
In the spring of 1914, a group of young students gather in an art studio for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke are two components of a love triangle, and at the outset of the war, they turn to each other. After volunteering for the Red Cross, Paul must confront the fact that life, love, and art will never be the same for him.
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4 out of 5 stars
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In Love and War
- By Cariola on 07-28-09
By: Pat Barker
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Asylum
- By: Patrick McGrath
- Narrated by: Sir Ian McKellen
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,028
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,765
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,758
In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting - a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues -a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.
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5 out of 5 stars
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So enjoyed this book!
- By Mebythesea on 10-07-08
By: Patrick McGrath
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Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert, Lydia Davis - translator
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 366
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 298
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Story4 out of 5 stars 293
Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Ironic, humorous, and restrained
- By Esther on 05-13-13
By: Gustave Flaubert, and others
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 81
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 78
Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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Netherland
- By: Joseph O'Neill
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 323
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 140
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 141
Alone and un-tethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Get Your Post-Colonial Gatsby ON!
- By Darwin8u on 04-13-12
By: Joseph O'Neill
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Red Plenty
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 157
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 130
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 131
Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, and as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Simple review
- By Jay J Peters on 06-24-18
By: Francis Spufford
-
Amerika
- The Missing Person: A New Translation by Mark Harman Based on the Restored Text
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 95
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 76
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 73
A Brilliant new translation of the great writer's least Kafkaesque novel, based on a German-language text that was produced by a team of international scholars and that is more faithful to Kafka's original manuscript than anything we have had before. With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his translation of Kafka's The Castle, the award-winning translator Mark Harman now restores the humor and particularity of language to Amerika.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
ha ha ha this is terrific
- By tom on 01-29-14
By: Franz Kafka
-
Doctor Zhivago
- By: Boris Pasternak, Larissa Volokhonsky - translator, Richard Pevear - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 738
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 634
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 630
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Russian Philosophical Feast
- By Syd Young on 02-16-13
By: Boris Pasternak, and others
-
Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 366
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 260
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 262
Emma Bovary is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She yearns for excitement and a sense of romance that pulls at her so strongly she is powerless to resist, even though pursuing her dreams will exact a terrible price. Learn why Gustave Flaubert's compelling heroine has enchanted and puzzled readers for centuries.
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4 out of 5 stars
-
Now Here's a Story
- By P. Giorgio on 09-06-03
By: Gustave Flaubert
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- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 631
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 559
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Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
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By: Italo Calvino
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Hermit in Paris
- Autobiographical Writings
- By: Martin McLaughlin translator, Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2
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This posthumously published collection offers a unique, puzzle-like portrait of one of the postwar era's most inventive and mercurial writers. In letters and journals, occasional pieces and interviews, Italo Calvino recalls growing up in seaside Italy and fighting in the antifascist resistance during World War II, traces the course of his literary career, and reflects on his many travels, including a journey through the United States in 1959 and 1960.
By: Martin McLaughlin translator, and others
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Mr. Palomar
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 12
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 10
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Story5 out of 5 stars 10
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.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
This is an AMAZING Book!
- By The on 09-13-19
By: Italo Calvino
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The Castle of Crossed Destinies
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 9
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 9
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 9
A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Uneven but worth listening to if you like Calvino
- By Daniel on 02-21-24
By: Italo Calvino
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The Cloven Viscount
- Translated by Archibald Colquhoun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 46
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 41
In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
By: Italo Calvino
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Marcovaldo
- or The Seasons in the City (Translated by William Weaver)
- By: Italo Calvino, William Weaver - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 19
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 16
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 16
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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Perfect narrator and wonderful story
- By Drew on 12-17-17
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 631
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 559
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 554
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
-
Hermit in Paris
- Autobiographical Writings
- By: Martin McLaughlin translator, Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2
This posthumously published collection offers a unique, puzzle-like portrait of one of the postwar era's most inventive and mercurial writers. In letters and journals, occasional pieces and interviews, Italo Calvino recalls growing up in seaside Italy and fighting in the antifascist resistance during World War II, traces the course of his literary career, and reflects on his many travels, including a journey through the United States in 1959 and 1960.
By: Martin McLaughlin translator, and others
-
Mr. Palomar
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 12
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 10
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 10
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.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
This is an AMAZING Book!
- By The on 09-13-19
By: Italo Calvino
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The Castle of Crossed Destinies
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 9
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 9
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 9
A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Uneven but worth listening to if you like Calvino
- By Daniel on 02-21-24
By: Italo Calvino
-
The Cloven Viscount
- Translated by Archibald Colquhoun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 46
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 41
In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
By: Italo Calvino
-
Marcovaldo
- or The Seasons in the City (Translated by William Weaver)
- By: Italo Calvino, William Weaver - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 19
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 16
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 16
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.
-
5 out of 5 stars
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Perfect narrator and wonderful story
- By Drew on 12-17-17
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
The Complete Cosmicomics
- Translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, & William Weaver
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator, Tim Parks - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 58
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 46
Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical, and wise, these 34 dazzling stories - collected here in one definitive anthology - relate complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Moments of Greatness = Worth the Read
- By Amazon Customer on 08-06-18
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
Last Comes the Raven
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 1
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 1
Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection - one of Calvino’s earliest - take place in a World War II era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller’s later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him.
By: Italo Calvino
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Six Memos for the Next Millennium
- By: Italo Calvino, Geoffrey Brock - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 29
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 29
At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Why Read the Classics?
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 4
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 4
Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. 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 36 immediately relevant, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Collection of Sand
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 4
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 4
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 4
Italo Calvino's unbounded curiosity and masterly imagination are displayed in peak form in Collection of Sand, the last of his works published during his lifetime. Here he applies his graceful intellect to the delights of the visual world in essays on subjects ranging from cuneiform and antique maps to Mexican temples and Japanese gardens.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful prose, topics, and narration
- By Drew on 06-02-19
By: Italo Calvino
-
The Road to San Giovanni
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 5
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 5
In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema, and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language, and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance.
By: Italo Calvino
-
The Written World and the Unwritten World
- Essays
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 3
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 3
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.
By: Italo Calvino
-
The Path to the Spider's Nests
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 4
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 4
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 4
Italo Calvino was only 23 when he first published this bold and imaginative novel. It tells the story of Pin, a cobbler's apprentice in a town on the Ligurian coast during World War II. He lives with his sister, a prostitute, and spends as much time as he can at a seedy bar where he amuses the adult patrons. After a mishap with a Nazi soldier, Pin becomes involved with a band of partisans. Calvino's portrayal of these characters, seen through the eyes of a child, is not only a revealing commentary on the Italian resistance but an insightful coming-of-age story.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
Numbers in the Dark
- And Other Stories
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 5
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 5
Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal.
By: Italo Calvino
-
Fantastic Tales
- Visionary and Everyday
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 23 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 5
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 5
Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a 20th-century master of the speculative.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Unexpected pleasure
- By Grant on 11-06-20
By: Italo Calvino
-
Invisible Cities
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Richard Higgins
- Length: 2 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Performance3 out of 5 stars 6
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 6
In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Such a wonderful book ruined by terrible narration
- By anonymous on 08-18-23
By: Italo Calvino
-
Italian Folktales
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 28 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 28
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
Chosen as one of the New York Times's 10 best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists.
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5 out of 5 stars
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At Last: Unbridled Delight
- By John on 06-12-20
By: Italo Calvino
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