
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
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Narrated by:
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Jefferson Mays
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By:
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Italo Calvino
About this listen
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
©1979 Giulio Einaudi Editore, S.p.A., Torino; 1981 Harcourt, Inc. (translation) (P)2017 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are 36 immediately relevant, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.
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Story
Italo Calvino's unbounded curiosity and masterly imagination are displayed in peak form in Collection of Sand, the last of his works published during his lifetime. Here he applies his graceful intellect to the delights of the visual world in essays on subjects ranging from cuneiform and antique maps to Mexican temples and Japanese gardens.
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Beautiful prose, topics, and narration
- By Drew on 06-02-19
By: Italo Calvino
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Last Comes the Raven
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection - one of Calvino’s earliest - take place in a World War II era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller’s later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him.
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Early Calvino stories
- By Brett Dewing on 04-06-25
By: Italo Calvino
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The Blind Owl
- Authorized by the Sadegh Hedayat Foundation - First Translation into English Based on the Bombay Edition
- By: Sadegh Hedayat, Naveed Noori - translator
- Narrated by: Sean Antony Farmiloe
- Length: 4 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Widely regarded as Sadegh Hedayat's masterpiece, The Blind Owl is the most important work of literature to come out of Iran in the past century. On the surface, this work seems to be a tale of doomed love, but soon basic facts become obscure and the listener realizes this book is much more than a love story. Although The Blind Owl has been compared to the works of Kafka and Poe, it defies categorization. By preserving the spirit as well as the structure of Hedayat's writing, this edition brings the English listener into the world of The Blind Owl as never before.
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Nothing
- By Shiraz on 07-06-24
By: Sadegh Hedayat, and others
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The Castle
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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On his deathbed, Franz Kafka asked that all his unpublished manuscripts be burned. Fortunately, his request was ignored, allowing such works as The Trial to earn recognition among the literary masterpieces of the 20th century. This brilliant new translation of The Castle captures comedic elements and visual imagery that earlier interpretations missed.
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Obscure, enigmatic, and not for everyone
- By John on 02-08-06
By: Franz Kafka
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The Castle of Crossed Destinies
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
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Uneven but worth listening to if you like Calvino
- By Daniel on 02-21-24
By: Italo Calvino
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Shame
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is "not quite Pakistan". In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men - one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure - Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation.
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Should have quit at chapter 2
- By G. Miller on 06-23-23
By: Salman Rushdie
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Numbers in the Dark
- And Other Stories
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal.
By: Italo Calvino
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Under the Jaguar Sun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses of taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico's fiery chiles and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun". In "A King Listens", a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant's thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. "The Name, the Nose" drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them.
By: Italo Calvino
Personal favorite!
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Intellectual exercise
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Narrator was great
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Was difficult to listen to.
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After finishing the book, you, the reader, sit down to try to quantify how exactly you feel about a book like this one.
After finishing the book, you, the reader, sit do
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Unusual, but thought-provoking
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What made the experience of listening to If on a Winter's Night a Traveler the most enjoyable?
This book is a one of a kind experience. The author sets out to upset the readers equilibrium and destroy any initial expectations of how this novel might play out. Intriguing!At some point you also realize you are the main character. This adds a whole layer to the experience. This is not the kind of book where you can just take it easy and expect a normal plot to unfold.
What other book might you compare If on a Winter's Night a Traveler to and why?
The only book I've read that I can compare to "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" is "Steppenwolf" by Herman Hesse. Not because the literary styles are the same, but because it was also a very different reading experience that I found sometimes frustrating and sometimes difficult to understand and had to read more then once. Other than that they are very different novels.Which character – as performed by Jefferson Mays – was your favorite?
Ermes Marana "The bad guy". What makes him so villainous is everything he does is meant to destroy the usual benefits we expect from our reading experience. Who can be any meaner than that?Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The first Chapter of "If On a Winters Night a Traveler" Not only did I find the writing lovely initially, but on reflection it was the first hint of the readers real role in the book.It follows:
"The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the hapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station café odor. There is someone looking through the befogged class, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust. The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences."
This is the passage that puts the reader in the book.
Any additional comments?
This was one audio book that I wish I had the hard copy as a reference, it would make it easier to understand what's going on. I know this is a book I will be listening to again and again.Like falling down a Rabbit Hole
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hu?
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Wonderful
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A completely unique book about books written for book people. How can that not make you smile?
Though, ironically, there’s no way I would have finished the paperback, lol. This was a necessary and well done work of Audible.
The novel is not one story but many stories. It’s meta and funny, politically damning and irreverent, frivolous and philosophical.
But what does it all mean?!?!
Darlings, meaning isn’t something you take, it’s something you give.
Just find a comfy spot, open your heart, and listen.
Tell me another one Calvino...
Odd Ball Classic
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