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  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446414361
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

Marcovaldo



Twenty stories, structured around the seasons as the yearly cycle revolves five times. This is Calvino's magical realist urban fantasy.

Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems.

'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer

'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446414361
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

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.

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Praise for Marcovaldo

Calvino is surely among the handful of living writers that can be called, without hesitation, great. Each book by Calvino is a completely original conception. Marcovaldo is one of the best works of fiction published

Spectator

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century

Guardian

It is the refinement, the oddness and the humour of the thoughts he gets which make Calvino a rare pleasure to read; he is a match for Borges as he stealthily patrols the limits of the unthinkable

John Sturrock, New Review

He will continue to glitter, this strange, lonely prospector in the universe of words, well into the next millennium and after, a master in the empire of the imagination

Independent

What is so much admired by the readers of Mr. Calvino's later Invisible Cities was already at work in Marcovaldo and with a more cogent narrative drive... Marcovaldo conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life

New York Times

Calvino is surely among the handful of living writers that can be called, without hesitation, great. Each book by Calvino is a completely original conception. Marcovaldo is one of the best works of fiction published

Spectator

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century

Guardian

It is the refinement, the oddness and the humour of the thoughts he gets which make Calvino a rare pleasure to read; he is a match for Borges as he stealthily patrols the limits of the unthinkable

John Sturrock, New Review

He will continue to glitter, this strange, lonely prospector in the universe of words, well into the next millennium and after, a master in the empire of the imagination

Independent