Italo Calvino

8 results

Everything Can Be Dismantled: One humble utopian vision emerged: “It’s great,” somebody said of the improvised shelter. “Rent-free.”
Everything Can Be Dismantled review: a rehearsal for change amid the housing crisis

Everything Can Be Dismantled The Lir ★★★ One risk of political theatre, even that as dreamy as the new Discotheque Collective, is that it may be overt(...)

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel: ‘I like reviews. It shows that someone has read the book and is willing to discuss it.’
Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel Q&A: ‘I wrote one of my first novels sitting up a tree’

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel is a novelist from Equatorial Guinea, who writes mostly about social, political and economic ineqality in his country and in A(...)

‘Reading is a choice. Not only in the obvious sense of taking up a book, or taking up one book and not another, but when reading the book at hand. It’s assessing the facts of the case (even the fictional ones) and seeing some as more relevant to a satisfying reading than others.’
George O’Brien: ‘Writing has taught me to be disciplined, to be patient, to persist’
  • Books
  • February 19, 2015, 11:43

George O’Brien is Professor Emeritus of English at Georgetown University, Washington DC. He is author of three memoirs, The Village of Longing, Dan(...)

Miriam Frank: ‘Much of today’s writing appears to be celebrity related and follows fashions, relying on the expertise of others and writing to a learnt formula, rather than through the direct experience and observation of life.’
Miriam Frank: ‘Reading sharpened my understanding of human behaviour’
  • Books
  • January 26, 2015, 15:00

Miriam Frank is the author of My Innocent Absence: Tales from a Nomadic Life (Arcadia Books), an exploration of identity, belonging and relationships,(...)

Sacro Gra review: a gentle drive around the city of Rome

The Grande Raccordo Anulare (GRA) is Italy’s most expensive public highway; a 50-km ring road that encircles the city of Rome. If you listen closel(...)

Author Lean Cullinan. Photograph: Alan Betson
Léan Cullinan on learning to love rewriting
  • Books
  • August 7, 2014, 12:00

Léan Cullinan has been writing since childhood and is a graduate of the MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin. Her debut novel is The(...)

Sinan Antoon: longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014
Brought to Book: Sinan Antoon on his literary life
  • Books
  • April 21, 2014, 01:00

Sinan Antoon is author of The Corpse Washer (Yale University Press), translated from Arabic by the author and recently longlisted for the Independe(...)

Italo Calvino, Letters 1941-1985, selected and with an introduction by Michael Wood, translated by Martin McLaughlin.
  • Books
  • July 20, 2013, 01:00

The letters of Italo Calvino? Surely not, we might think, given this writer’s famous guardedness and privacy, his distrust of the biographical, of the(...)