Six Memos For The Next Millennium

Download or read book Six Memos for the Next Millennium written by Italo Calvino and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant précis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in1985, of a brain hemorrhage.

Download or read book Cosmicomics written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1968 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. “Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?” Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Download or read book Six Memos from the Last Millennium written by Joseph Skibell and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A storyteller’s take on the Talmud and the timeless wisdom contained within its tales provides “a fresh look at an ancient source” (Kirkus Reviews). A thief-turned-saint, killed by an insult. A rabbi burning down his world in order to save it. A man who lost his sanity while trying to fathom the origin of the universe. A beautiful woman battling her brother’s and her husband’s egos to preserve their family. Stories such as these enliven the pages of the Talmud, the great repository of ancient wisdom that is one of the sacred texts of the Jewish people. Comprised of the Mishnah, the oral law of the Torah, and the Gemara, a multigenerational metacommentary on the Mishnah dating from between 3950 and 4235 (190 and 475 CE), the Talmud presents a formidable challenge to understand without scholarly training and study. But what if one approaches it as a collection of tales with surprising relevance for contemporary readers? In Six Memos from the Last Millennium, Joseph Skibell, critically acclaimed author of A Blessing on the Moon and other novels, reads some of the Talmud’s tales with a storyteller’s insight, concentrating on the lives of the legendary rabbis depicted in its pages to uncover the wisdom they can still impart to our modern age. He unifies strands of stories that are scattered throughout the Talmud into coherent narratives or “memos,” which he then analyzes and interprets from his perspective as a novelist. In Skibell’s imaginative and personal readings, this sacred literature frequently defies our conventional notions of piety. Sometimes wild, rude, and even bawdy, these memos from the last millennium pursue a livable transcendence, a way of fusing the mundane hours of earthly life with a cosmic sense of holiness and wonder.

Download or read book Difficult Loves written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1984 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a collection of stories written during the 1940s and 1950s, the author captures moments of revelation in the lives of ordinary people, instants blending recognition and alarm as deceptions and illusions are laid bare.

Download or read book Collection of Sand written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published for the first time in English, a final collection of essays by the renowned fabulist writer tours the visual world through explorations of subjects ranging from cuneiform and antique maps to Mexican temples and Japanese gardens.

Download or read book The Road to San Giovanni written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heartfelt, affecting, and wise, the essay collection The Road to San Giovanni offers Italo Calvino's reflections on his own life and work in five elegant memory exercises.

Download or read book Six Walks in the Fictional Woods written by Umberto Eco and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-21 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Umberto Eco shares with us his Secret Life as a reader—his love for MAD magazine, for Scarlett O'Hara, for the nineteenth-century French novelist Nerval's Sylvie, for Little Red Riding Hood, Agatha Christie, Agent 007 and all his ladies. We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.