Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino

Overview

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156453806
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/03/1978
Series:	Harvest Book Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	62,643
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1290L (what's this?)

About the Author

ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.

Editorial Reviews

Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.
—New York Review of Books

Gore Vidal

Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.

The New York Review of Books Gore Vidal

"Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant." ---Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

No matter how good the narrator—and John Lee is quite fine here, precise and elegant—some books are difficult to put across in audio. In Calvino’s 1972 classic, Marco Polo describes the cities he visited on his expeditions to Kublai Khan. You must set aside everything you expect in a novel, such as character or plot, and be prepared after each city's description to think about what it means and how it fits into the book. Lee never rushes, but you may still feel the need to pause and reflect before going on. You may even want to look at a map as this is a work that talks a lot about atlases. Or you can just sink into the music of Lee's voice. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2013 - AudioFile