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The Castle Of Crossed Destinies
  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446414217
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

The Castle Of Crossed Destinies

Formats & editions
Paperback
20 Oct 2026
Paperback
7 Nov 1997
EBook
1 Aug 2011
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Experience a BRIEF ENCOUNTER like no other, with Italo Calvino, the master of post-war experimental fiction, and his mind-bendingly brilliant novella about a travelling band of Tarot readers.


A magical, mystical novella about the art and power of storytelling, this is Italo Calvino's miniature masterpiece.

A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then in a tavern. Having mysteriously lost their powers of speech, they must tell their tales using only a deck of tarot cards. As their stories interlink and overlap, a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of the human quest for meaning unfolds.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days
  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446414217
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

About the author

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (1923-1985), one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in 1985.
IC

Also by Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities
The Baron in the Trees
Cosmicomics
The Distance of the Moon
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
The Narrative of Trajan's Column
Last Comes the Raven
See all

Praise for The Castle Of Crossed Destinies

A work that celebrates storytelling… Magical.

Fiona Wilson, The Times

Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found this special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere

Gore Vidal

The interlinking of tales is incredibly complex and subtle: a history of all human consciousness through the myths of Oedipus, Parsifal, Faust, Hamlet and so on. The Castle of Crossed destinies is a shamelessly original work of art-beautiful in the sense that it is the careful statement of an artist we have learned to trust

New Yorker

The marriage of the verbal and the visual in The Castle of Crossed Destinies seems almost prodigious. It is as if sulpher and mercury had at last fused into gold

Times Literary Supplement