Six memos for the next millennium - Italo Calvino

'Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing ... like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void'

With
imagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of the
great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future.
His effervescent last works, left unfinished at his death, were the
Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was due to deliver at Harvard in
1985-86. These surviving drafts explore the literary concepts closest
to his heart: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and
Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth), in serious yet playful
essays that reveal his debt to the comic strip and the folktale. This
collection, now in a fluent and supple new translation, is a brilliant
prcis of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium
he addressed.

Translated by Geoffrey Brock

'The book I give most to people is Six Memos for the Next Millennium' Ali Smith

'Wonderful . . . full of wit and erudition' Daily Telegraph