A collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of Calvino''s approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature Reading, writing, translating; the avant-garde and tradition; the fate of the novel: these are some of the themes of The Written World and the Unwritten World. A collection of essays, forewords, articles, interviews, notes, and other occasional pieces, this work displays Calvino''s remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world. Drawn from Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto (2002), Sulla fiaba (1988), and uncollected essays, this volume of previously untranslated work--now rendered in English by Ann Goldstein--is a major statement in literary criticism.


Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was born in Cuba and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He was a member of the partisan movement during the German occupation of northern Italy in World War II. The novel that resulted from that experience, published in English as The Path to the Nest of Spiders, won widespread acclaim. His other works of fiction include The Baron in the Trees, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Cosmicomics, Difficult Loves, If on a winter’s night a traveler..., Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, Mr. Palomar, The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount, Under the Jaguar Sun, and The Watchers and Other Stories. His other works include Six Memos for the Next Millennium, The Uses of Literature, collections of literary essays, and the anthologies Italian Folktales and Fantastical Tales. At the time of his death, in Siena at age 61, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer.