book data
137 ratings, 3.99 average rating, 8 reviews
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published
October 1986
by Harcourt
binding
Hardcover, 341 pages
isbn
0151932050
(isbn13: 9780151932054)
description
One comes away from this collection of intellectually playful essays...by Italy's foremost modern novelist...inspired to go back and reread the body ...more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 211)
Read in October, 2008
Waaaahhhhh... Calvino is/remains so amazing all the time. This is my first foray into his nonfiction, after reading the majority of his novels in high school and college. Everything about these essays is so lucid, so intelligent, and so obviously linked with his elegant, mathematical fiction style. These essays in the vein of Sontag, Barthes, and Benjamin further confirm my belief that he created the most consistently impressive prose of the 20th Century that I've encountered.
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Read in August, 2007
Italo Calvino is my Number One MySpace Friend. It's an illustrious position to hold and one that I do not take lightly. These essays make my brain mushy in the best possible way. I think I want to have his posthumous literary metaphorical babies. Never mind N'Sync, where can I get a poster of Calv?
Really, though, any one of these essays is worth the price of admission alone.
Really, though, any one of these essays is worth the price of admission alone.
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Got this at the used bookstore. Someday I'll have time to read a book that is not Beowulf, and on that glorious day, this perhaps.
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7 comments
I re-read his essay "Why Read the Classics?" every three or four months. It helps remind me why I love reading and re-reading.
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Read in January, 1990
This collection of essays provides a major framework for how I view the act of reading/information networks.
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So far I'm a big fan of:
Cybernetics and Ghosts
The Hypothetical Bookshelf
Cybernetics and Ghosts
The Hypothetical Bookshelf
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Read in April, 2008
Loved it. He is humorous and pretty easy to follow.
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