Sign up to our emails and be the first to know about new releases, special offers and more.
Become a Readings Member to make your shopping experience even easier. Sign in or sign up for free!
Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre to view your orders, change your details, or view your lists, or sign out.
Australian Book Retailer of the Year 2021
Italo Calvino
‘I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends’ Salman Rushdie From the age of twelve, the Baron Cosimo…
In stock at 4 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 4 shops
Meticulously selected and artfully recreated, the selection of stories in Italian is vast and ranges geographically from Corsica and Sicily to Venice and the Alps. Calvino is himself clearly captivated…
Includes stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures.
In stock at 2 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 2 shops
Fifty new books at e1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry
‘Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and…
In stock at 3 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 3 shops
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…
In stock at 5 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 5 shops
Illustrated 50th Anniversary Edition - With an introduction by #1 New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anthony Doerr
A beautiful new illustrated hardcover in the Mariner Classics line: Italo…
Order online and we’ll ship when availablePre-order now
A couple on a journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king…
A scintillating collection of essays that encapsulates the great Italian writer’s approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature, now available in English for the first time
When the last fire goes out, time too will be finished
Taken from his Collection of Sand, these marvelous essays are not great ideas in themselves but commentaries on great…
One of the world’s best storytellers, Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities) pinpoints for future generations the universal values for literature. Here are his works, methods, intentions, and hopes.
Chosen by The New York Times as one of its best books in the year of its original publication, this treasure trove of 200 lively Italian folktales has won a…
Available to order, ships in approx 2 weeksAvailable to order
Available in English for the first time, a collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of this great Italian master’s approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature
A charming portrait of one man’s dreams and schemes, by the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century (Guardian).
Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War contains three stories drawing on Italo Calvino’s memories of the Second World War in Italy.
Available to order, ships in approx 4 weeksAvailable to order
A collection of short stories compiled, edited, and introduced by Italo Calvino – including works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Balzac, Gogol, Poe, and many others – surveying the phenomenon of the…
Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler’s assistant, both arrogant and insecure who - while the Second World War rages - sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the…
Claudia Dellacasa
Italo Calvino (1923-85) travelled to Japan in the autumn of 1976. Thereafter, his work shows an increasing fascination with Japanese literature and Zen Buddhism, even as he adds Japanese works…
Available to order, ships in 7-14 daysAvailable to order
This is an account of the universe as a cosmic joke, surreal random fiction. Ofwfq is like matter - he can be neither created nor destroyed. In 1000 diverse shapes…
In stock at 7 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 7 shops
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…
A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards…
Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; These three vivid images are the points of departure for Calvino’s classic triptych of moral tales, now…
This book applies three of the literary qualities sketched by Italo Calvino in his Memos for the Next Millennium - lightness, quickness, multiplicity - to a wide variety of ancient…
A captivating, realist collection of Calvino's early stories
These early short stories brim with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, telling tales both sumptuous and unnerving.
Calvino's war-torn…
In stock at 6 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 6 shops
An empty suit of armor is the hero in this witty novella, a picaresque gem that brilliantly parodies medieval knighthood.
Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice.
A beautiful hardback edition of Calvino's genre-switching masterwork. A book of surprise and adventure but you, the reader, are the hero.
Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic, this collection provides the author’s criticism.
A spectacular display of this key European writer’s early work This dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino’s unique…
P Morris,Alain Wesson,McLaughlin
This first study in English of the complete writings of Italo Calvino (1923-85) offers new interpretations of Calvino’s main works, taking into account some important unpublished material, and analyses Calvino’s…
A collection of short stories covering the length of the author’s writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. It includes fables; a town where…
Dani Cavallaro
Examines the work of Italo Calvino in the context of the philosophical ideas he advanced in his theoretical and critical output. In the process, this examination bears witness to an…
Thirty-six essays by Calvino on his personal classics: the writers, poets and scientists who meant most to him at various stages of his life. His pieces range from antiquity (Homer…
‘This brilliant collection of essays should be a feast for his admirers, as well as for those who approach his dazzling oeuvre for the first time.. .Calvino is not only…
The author was a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This book offers a collection of his letters.
The world of Calvino is a world of fable, but he uses its mechanisms to focus with unerring precision on human reality. Nature in these stories has a magical quality…
The three long stories in this volume show the range and virtuosity of Italy’s most imaginative writer. Like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino dreams perfect dreams…
With encyclopedic knowledge, this title writes about such diverse subjects as the imaginative pleasures of maps, bizarre exhibitions and the earliest forms of written language. It provides a glimpse into…
Available to order, ships in 3-5 daysAvailable to order
Italo Calvino’s last fictional work is a witty, elegant, fantastic rendering of the ultimate observer, whose name, Mr. Palomar, deliberately evokes the famous telescope. Beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination…
A postmodern novel which combines a love and a detective story with a sardonic dissection of the publishing industry in an allegory of reading. Two readers attempt to finish the…
In these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. Calvino…
Mr Palomar is a delightful eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of migrant…
A collection of nineteenth-century fantastic literature - from enchantments and horrors to subtler, psychological terrors. It includes Hoffmann’s The Sandman , Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and Dickens’ The Signal-Man…
A posthumously published collection of short stories that span the breadth of Italo Calvino’s career.
The first complete English-language edition of one of Calvino’s important early short story collections
Intricate interior lives are brilliantly explored in these short stories, now presented in this collection as Calvino intended them.
In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures.
A revision of the translation published in 1956 which incorporates changes made by the author to the work first published in 1947 and subsequently revised in 1964.