If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest.

Ingenious

Breathtakingly inventive

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends

A devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport... It is a "world novel": take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair

A brilliant work of the imagination and the intellect working in union. And, by the way, it's very funny also

Italo Calvino (Author)
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.

William Weaver (Translator)
William Weaver has translated Umberto Eco, Italo Svevo, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino and Roberto Calasso, among others. He is a professor at Bard College.