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Italo Calvino.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.
Minerva. 1981

Calvino’s masterpiece opens with a scene that’s reassuringly commonplace: apparently, indeed, it’s taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but the latest Calvino, the book you are holding in your hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are dangerous on this most bewitching switch-back ride to the heart of story-telling.

Italo Calvino.
Why Read the Classics?.
Penguin. 2002

Why Read the Classics? is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one – classics are those books that people always say they are ‘rereading’, not ‘reading’), this is an absorbing collection of Italo Calvino’s witty and passionate criticism.

With thirty-six essays – including thoughts on figures such as Homer, Hemingway, Borges, Tolstoy and Twain – Why Read the Classics? represents Calvino’s own canon of great works and is full of fascinating insights from the mercurial, incisive mind of a brilliant reader as well as writer.