A young resistance fighter for the communists during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Calvino became and remained a consistently original writer of intellectual fantasy. What was Italo Calvino? A prepostmodernist? Maybe it's time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes. The translations are entirely satisfactory, and Martin McLaughlin's introduction couldn't be better as a guide to these dazzlingly idiosyncratic tales. More than a third of the stories were entirely new to me, and will be to most readers in English some of them are jewels. It's a joy to have all the Cosmicomics within one cover - and a handsome cover it is, and a well-made book. It's a compendium of the volume Cosmicomics (published in English in 1968), seven newly translated stories from La Memoria del Mondo (1968), all the stories from Time and the Hunter (1969), four from Numbers in the Dark (1995), and a couple of uncollected pieces. Here, from Italo Calvino, is a great big basket of stories - nectarines, apricots, peaches, figs, everything. The summer reading I like best is either a lovely, long, fat novel to lie down with and get lost in, or a collection of stories, like a basket of summer fruit, to savour one or two at a time.
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