#calvino — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #calvino, aggregated by home.social.
-
Each reads in the other the unwritten story.
Italo Calvino
If on a Winter's Night a TravelerPhoto: Dieter Krehbiel
-
Fantasy is a place where it rain.
Italo Calvino, American Lessons
Photo: Mafamai -
T.A.E.’s Book Review – Why Read the Classics by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s Why Read the Classics? is less a tidy argument than a lively act of literary persuasion. Rather than defending canonical literature by appeal to duty or prestige, Calvino makes a subtler and more generous claim: a classic is not a relic preserved by institutions, but a work that remains unfinished in the reader’s experience. His most quoted definition captures this beautifully: “a classic is a book” that “never exhausted all it has to say.” In that single […]https://renminds.org/2026/07/12/t-a-e-s-book-review-why-read-the-classics-by-italo-calvino/
-
Geschriebene und ungeschriebene Welt: Eine neue Auswahl echter #Calvino-Texte erstmals auf Deutsch
https://www.l-iz.de/bildung/buecher/2026/06/geschriebene-und-ungeschriebene-welt-neue-auswahl-echter-calvino-texte-erstmals-deutsch-662220
#Rezensionen #Bücher #Essay -
Italo Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' (1979) is rather prophetic in how computer produced content leads to a mass production of random noise, which then is marketed or not based on response. #Calvino #LLM #reversecentaur #postmodernism
-
The Adaptable Educator’s (TEA’s) Book Review – The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s The Complete Cosmicomics is one of the most playful achievements of modern literature: a book that treats cosmology not as a field of cold explanation but as a theatre of longing, memory, chance, and comic self-invention. The author takes the grand, impersonal language of science and bends it into something intimate and strangely tender. Galaxies, tides, molecules, and extinct species become the raw material for stories that feel at once prehistoric and deeply human.
At the centre of the book is Qfwfq, Calvino’s unforgettable narrator, who speaks as if he has survived every stage of the universe. That voice is the book’s greatest invention. Qfwfq is not merely a character; he is a consciousness stretched across time, one that remembers impossible things with the casual certainty of autobiography. The writing uses this fantastical perspective to make the cosmos feel inhabited by desire. Even in stories built from scientific premises, what matters is not explanation but feeling: jealousy, nostalgia, curiosity, rivalry, attraction. The universe is never abstract for long. It becomes a stage for emotional comedy and metaphysical yearning.
One of the book’s major pleasures is the way it turns scientific fact into folklore. In “The Distance of the Moon,” the moon is not a remote body in space but a reachable, almost touchable presence, and the story transforms astronomy into a myth of pursuit and loss. In “All at One Point,” the universe begins in collapse and intimacy before expanding into separation; the comic image of everyone crowded together captures both cosmological theory and the human ache for closeness. Calvino is brilliant at finding the hidden lyricism in science, and at exposing the absurdity lurking beneath all systems of order. A phrase like “the first quark” becomes, in his hands, a kind of fairy-tale opening.
What makes the book so enduring is that its wit never cancels its melancholy. Calvino’s humour is bright, but it is always shadowed by impermanence. Species vanish, configurations dissolve, celestial arrangements change, and even memory itself proves unstable. In “The Form of Space,” for example, an abstract spatial paradox becomes a meditation on separation, visibility, and the human need to be recognized. In “The Dinosaurs,” the return of the extinct creature is not triumphant but uneasy, as though survival itself were a burden of estrangement. He repeatedly suggests that history is not progress but mutation, and that identity is always provisional.
Stylistically, the book is astonishingly elegant. It is written with crystalline clarity, but its clarity is never plainness. The author can move from comic detail to philosophical implication in a single sentence, and he does so without ever sounding heavy-handed. The prose is light on its feet, yet it carries enormous intellectual and emotional weight. That balance is the secret of the collection: it is simultaneously whimsical and exacting, imaginative and disciplined, airy and exact.
As a whole, The Complete Cosmicomics reads like a bestiary of the universe’s first emotions. It is a book about how matter becomes memory, how space becomes longing, and how the vastness of existence can still be narrated through the needs of a single voice. Calvino reminds us that the universe is not only something to be measured; it is something to be imagined. And in his hands, imagination becomes a form of knowledge.
It is a rare book that can make the birth of the cosmos feel both scientifically vast and heartbreakingly personal. Calvino does that again and again, and the result is one of the most original works of twentieth-century literature.
#BookReviews #Calvino #ItaloCalvino #language #LiteraryCriticism #literature -
“Italo Calvino: A Traveller In A World Of Uncertainty”, History Today (https://www.historytoday.com/archive/portrait-author-historian/italo-calvino-traveller-world-uncertainty).
Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725403
#Books #ItaloCalvino #Calvino #Fiction #Literature #Time #Uncertainty #Communism #Fascism
-
Gruppo di lettura Bucefalo | La spirale (Cosmicomiche, Calvino)
Mercoledì 11 febbraio, dalle 18:30, presso Associazione Allons Enfants, piazzale Martini 11, 20137; e anche online, su https://meet.jit.si/Bucefalo
ciao! anche a febbraio proseguiamo con la narrativa, e leggiamo La spirale (dalle Cosmicomiche di Calvino). ci vediamo, per chi può e per chi vuole, nella sede di Allons Anfants, piazzale Martini 11, alle ore 18.30. come sempre: ci si può collegare da remoto, si possono condividere merende e bevute, cercheremo di stampare le dispense (che trovi scrivendoci qui, sul gruppo telegram e sul nostro drive). se hai domande scrivici. baci
#calvino #animali #calvairate #antispecismo #letture #letteratura
-
I am looking for the original Italian text of Italo Calvino’s Cibernetica e fantasmi. Appunti sulla narrativa come processo combinatorio. So far, I only managed to find its English translation, “Cybernetics and Ghosts”.
Can someone help me find it?
#help #literature #archive #Calvino #library #essay #lecture #research
-
#NewIssue
E' online l'ultimo numero di #Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, and Philosophy of Literature.
Contiene, tra gli altri, articoli su #StephenKing, The #EnglishPatient di Michael #Ondaatje, #Lacan, #Calvino, #EliasCanetti, #AntonioStoppaniQui in #OpenAccess
🔗 https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/enthymema/issue/view/2675#LiteraryCriticism #LiteraryTheory #PhilosophyofLiterature #Literature #Philosophy
-
Gerade erschienen 😍
Die unglaubliche Leichtigkeit eines schweren Autors, oder: #Calvino liest #Boccaccio
https://www.chronos-verlag.ch/node/28958
@fidromanistik @romanistikde @avldigital @italianstudies @renaissance @bookstodon
-
"La légèreté pour moi s’associe à la précision et à la détermination, non au flou et à l’abandon au hasard. Paul Valéry a dit : “Il faut être léger comme l’oiseau et non comme la plume.”"
"La parole relie la trace visible à la chose invisible, à la chose absente, à la chose désirée ou redoutée, comme un fragile pont de fortune jeté sur le vide."
__________
Notes contemplatives - Italo Calvino, Leçons américaines
#Philosophie #MardiCestPhilosophie #Contemplation #Calvino
https://sites.google.com/view/mardiphilo/bo%C3%AEte-%C3%A0-outils-philosophiques/notes-contemplatives-de-lecture/nc-italo-calvino-le%C3%A7ons-am%C3%A9ricaines -
Italo #Calvino nelle città, alla (ri)scoperta di luoghi fantastici
Presentato in anteprima alla Festa del #Cinema di #Roma 2024, il documentario di Davide Ferrario e Marco Belpoliti dedicato allo scrittore italiano esce al cinema il 28, 29 e 30 ottobre, distribuito da RS Productions in collaborazione con Mirari Vos -
"Personne ne regarde la lune l’après-midi, et c’est le moment où elle aurait le plus besoin qu’on s'intéresse à elle, puisque son existence est encore douteuse à cette heure-là."
"Chacun est fait de ce qu’il a vécu, et personne ne peut lui enlever cela. Qui a vécu en souffrant reste fait de sa souffrance ; si on prétend la lui enlever, ce n’est plus lui."
Italo Calvino, Palomar.
__________
Retrouvez la Note contemplative :
https://sites.google.com/view/mardiphilo/bo%C3%AEte-%C3%A0-outils-philosophiques/notes-contemplatives-de-lecture/nc-italo-calvino-palomar
#Philosophie #Calvino #Vie #Mort #Univers -
La tarea es la de siempre: como escribió Italo #Calvino, "buscar y saber reconocer quién y qué, en medio del infierno, no es infierno, y hacerlo durar, y darle espacio".
✨
#CitasLiterarias #citas #LasCiudadesInvisibles #ItaloCalvino -
Viviamo in un’epoca in cui non si salva più niente né nessuno.
Italo #Calvino, “Prima dell’alfabeto”, 1982
