Last Comes the Raven
  • Published: 14 November 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784878214
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $26.00

Last Comes the Raven

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A captivating, realist collection of Calvino's early stories

These early short stories brim with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, telling tales both sumptuous and unnerving.

Calvino's war-torn Italy is vivid, intense, almost hyper-real. A trio of greedy burglars rob a pastry shop, a boy offers a girl presents of toads and insects from the garden, a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In every story he reveals the hidden meaning beneath the surface of everyday life, and the ludicrousness of war.

Some stories from Last Comes the Raven have been previously available in the collection Adam, One Afternoon. This new expanded collection includes several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein and is an important addition to Calvino's legacy.

'In Last Comes the Raven, a collection of early stories, we find the man behind the magician' New Yorker
  • Published: 14 November 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784878214
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $26.00
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About the author

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.

Also by Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
The Distance of the Moon
The Baron in the Trees
Cosmicomics
The Narrative of Trajan's Column
The Written World and the Unwritten World
Letters 1941-1985
See all

Praise for Last Comes the Raven

In these beautifully translated stories, the quality of the writing emerges as clearly as do the ease and range of his inventiveness. Calvino's special gift is to link the physical and immediate with an allegorical timelessness. All the characters and creatures in these stories conspire to convey a feeling of the wonder, mystery and terror of life

Guardian

Calvino's strength is his economy and subtlety. The best of his allegorical fantasies have the power of the Brothers Grimm, rollicking stories on the surface, with an underlying savagery

Listener

Calvino was drawn to narratives as pure and potent objects; in this collection, he examines but does not deconstruct them . . . There is the author's trademark ironic distance and careful wit, as well as tinges of surrealism. But, where the mature Calvino found a style that was supremely arch, alien, and spare, his more mimetic stories retain the funk of the human . . . The reader of Last Comes the Raven registers a bloom of social feelings: sympathy, recognition, curiosity

New Yorker