Last Comes the Raven
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $17.19
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Jefferson Mays
-
By:
-
Italo Calvino
About this listen
The first complete English-language edition of one of Calvino’s important early short-story collections.
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 invades a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In the title story, a compact masterpiece of shifting perspectives, a panicked soldier tries to keep his wits - and his life - when he faces off against a young partisan with a loaded rifle and miraculous aim. Throughout, Calvino delights in discovering hidden truths beneath the surface of everyday life.
Stories from Last Comes the Raven have been published in translation, but the collection as a whole has never appeared in English. This volume, including several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein, is an important addition to Calvino’s legacy.
©1994 Palomar S.r.l. e Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano (P)2021 Recorded BooksRelated to this topic
-
A Time to Love and a Time to Die
- By: Erich Maria Remarque
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After two years at the Russian front, Ernst Graeber finally receives three weeks' leave. But since leaves have been canceled before, he decides not to write his parents, fearing he would just raise their hopes. Then, when Graeber arrives home, he finds his house bombed to ruin and his parents nowhere in sight. Nobody knows if they are dead or alive. As his leave draws to a close, Graeber reaches out to Elisabeth, a childhood friend.
-
-
It’s a lot to take in.
- By Michael Cutler on 02-27-22
-
Barefoot Dreams of Petra Luna
- By: Alda P. Dobbs
- Narrated by: Kyla Garcia, Ana Osorio
- Length: 5 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1913, and 12-year-old Petra Luna’s mamá has died while the revolution rages in Mexico. Before her papá is dragged away by soldiers, Petra vows to him that she will care for the family she has left — her abuelita, her little sister, Amelia, and her baby brother, Luisito — until they can be reunited.
-
-
¡Me encanto!
- By Roxann Martinez on 01-11-23
By: Alda P. Dobbs
-
Exile and the Kingdom
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.
-
-
So good!
- By Christopher A. Douglas on 10-24-24
By: Albert Camus
-
The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
-
-
Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
-
Collected Stories of William Faulkner
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Susan Denaker, Scott Brick, and others
- Length: 31 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds listeners of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets. Among the 42 selections in this audiobook are such classics as "A Bear Hunt", "A Rose for Emily", "Two Soldiers", and "The Brooch".
-
-
Audiobook Table of Contents (by Chapter)
- By Anonymous User on 09-27-20
By: William Faulkner
-
The Death of Artemio Cruz
- A Novel
- By: Carlos Fuentes, Alfred MacAdam - translator
- Narrated by: Tony Chiroldes
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz’s heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. Perhaps Fuentes’ masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz is a haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico.
-
-
Great Writing
- By Kelly B. on 05-01-14
By: Carlos Fuentes, and others
-
A Time to Love and a Time to Die
- By: Erich Maria Remarque
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After two years at the Russian front, Ernst Graeber finally receives three weeks' leave. But since leaves have been canceled before, he decides not to write his parents, fearing he would just raise their hopes. Then, when Graeber arrives home, he finds his house bombed to ruin and his parents nowhere in sight. Nobody knows if they are dead or alive. As his leave draws to a close, Graeber reaches out to Elisabeth, a childhood friend.
-
-
It’s a lot to take in.
- By Michael Cutler on 02-27-22
-
Barefoot Dreams of Petra Luna
- By: Alda P. Dobbs
- Narrated by: Kyla Garcia, Ana Osorio
- Length: 5 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1913, and 12-year-old Petra Luna’s mamá has died while the revolution rages in Mexico. Before her papá is dragged away by soldiers, Petra vows to him that she will care for the family she has left — her abuelita, her little sister, Amelia, and her baby brother, Luisito — until they can be reunited.
-
-
¡Me encanto!
- By Roxann Martinez on 01-11-23
By: Alda P. Dobbs
-
Exile and the Kingdom
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.
-
-
So good!
- By Christopher A. Douglas on 10-24-24
By: Albert Camus
-
The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
-
-
Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
-
Collected Stories of William Faulkner
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Susan Denaker, Scott Brick, and others
- Length: 31 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds listeners of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets. Among the 42 selections in this audiobook are such classics as "A Bear Hunt", "A Rose for Emily", "Two Soldiers", and "The Brooch".
-
-
Audiobook Table of Contents (by Chapter)
- By Anonymous User on 09-27-20
By: William Faulkner
-
The Death of Artemio Cruz
- A Novel
- By: Carlos Fuentes, Alfred MacAdam - translator
- Narrated by: Tony Chiroldes
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz’s heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. Perhaps Fuentes’ masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz is a haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico.
-
-
Great Writing
- By Kelly B. on 05-01-14
By: Carlos Fuentes, and others
-
All for Nothing
- By: Walter Kempowski, Anthea Bell - translator, Jenny Erpenbeck - introduction
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat, and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish 12-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors - a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee.
-
-
All for Nothing
- By Lynn on 03-16-19
By: Walter Kempowski, and others
-
The Caves of Perigord
- By: Martin Walker
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Walker's richly interwoven novel opens with the arrival of a mysterious package for a young American woman working in a London auction house. Brought by a British officer, it contains a 17,000-year-old fragment of a cave painting left to him by his father, a former World War II hero. The fragment, significant and stunning in itself, is also the key to the existence of an unknown cave that may be more important in the history of art and human creation than the world-famous one at Lascaux.
-
-
A wonderful construct
- By Alfred North on 08-28-20
By: Martin Walker
-
All Our Broken Idols
- By: Paul M.M. Cooper
- Narrated by: Lara Sawalha
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Assyria, in the reign of Ashurbanipal. For Aurya and her daydreaming brother, Sharo, every day is a struggle for survival, as they dodge the beatings of their drunken father and scrabble for scraps of food. One violent evening, everything changes. Soon, they are on the barge of King Ashurbanipal, bound for the beautiful, near-mythical city of Nineveh.
-
-
What a great book!
- By Daniel on 07-14-21
By: Paul M.M. Cooper
-
To Build a Fire and Other Stories
- By: Jack London
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"To Build a Fire," the best-known of Jack London's many short stories, tells the tale of a solitary traveler on the Yukon Trail accompanied only by his dog as they endure the extreme cold. A classic narrative of a battle for survival against the forces of nature, "To Build a Fire" is London at his best. Also included here are "The Red One," "All Gold Canyon," "A Piece of Steak," "The Love of Life," "Flush of Gold," "The Story of Keesh," and "The Wisdom of the Trail."
-
-
Classic stories, poorly read
- By Lyle C Brown on 12-31-12
By: Jack London
-
One of Ours
- By: Willa Cather
- Narrated by: Kristen Underwood
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
-
-
Cather's writing is impeccable
- By Kelly on 12-20-19
By: Willa Cather
-
A Beautiful Place to Die
- By: Malla Nunn
- Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Unfolding in 1952 South Africa, A Beautiful Place to Die is a riveting international mystery that flows from the pen of author Malla Nunn. Police officer Emmanuel Cooper is dispatched to a remote town after a police captain is found murdered in a creek. Even though Cooper judges the crime open and shut, the government's feared Special Branch is summoned, making for an intrigue that will titillate any mystery fan.
-
-
Police Procedural & The Pain Of Apartheid
- By Sara on 09-30-15
By: Malla Nunn
-
The Magician of Lublin
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Larry Keith
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Magician can dazzle the crowds with his sleight of hand, climb to any height, open any lock. Fearlessly, he does death-defying tricks in theaters all over Poland. At home, his sweet Jewish wife waits for him to return from the city. In the city, his adoring mistresses wait for him to return from home. He holds the key to all hearts, but his own is beset with confusion.
-
-
Complex Masterpiece
- By Evan on 09-11-08
-
The Short Stories, Volume I
- By: Ernest Hemingway
- Narrated by: Stacy Keach
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This definitive audio collection, read by Stacy Keach, traces the development and maturation of Hemingway's distinct and revolutionary storytelling style - from the plain bald language of his first story to his mastery of seamless prose that contained a spare, eloquent pathos, as well as a sense of expansive solitude. These stories showcase the singular talent of a master, the most important American writer of the 20th century.
-
-
Papa wouldn't have like this recording.
- By Jerry`` on 03-16-04
By: Ernest Hemingway
-
The Road Back
- A Novel
- By: Erich Maria Remarque
- Narrated by: Graham Halstead
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After four grueling years, the Great War has finally ended. Now Ernst and the few men left from his company cannot help wondering what will become of them. The town they departed as eager young men seems colder, their homes smaller, the reasons their comrades had to die even more inexplicable. For Ernst and his friends, the road back to peace is more treacherous than they ever imagined. Suffering food shortages, political unrest, and a broken heart, Ernst undergoes a crisis that teaches him what there is to live for - and what he has that no one can ever take away.
-
-
Great Successor to All Quiet on the Western Front
- By BARRY on 02-20-19
-
The Unreal and the Real
- Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, Volume One: Where on Earth
- By: Ursula K. Le Guin
- Narrated by: Tandy Cronyn
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Unreal and the Real is a major event not to be missed. In this two-volume selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best short stories--as selected by the National Book Award winning author herself--the reader will be delighted, provoked, amused, and faced with the sharp, satirical voice of one of the best short story writers of the present day. Where on Earth explores Le Guin's earthbound stories which range around the world, from small town Oregon to middle Europe in the middle of revolution to summer camp.
-
-
Shame on you, Audible
- By Audrey McCombs on 07-03-20
-
The Sisters of Auschwitz
- The True Story of Two Jewish Sisters’ Resistance in the Heart of Nazi Territory
- By: Roxane van Iperen
- Narrated by: Susan Hoffman
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The unforgettable story of two unsung heroes of World War II: sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper who joined the Dutch Resistance, helped save dozen of lives, were captured by the Nazis, and ultimately survived the Holocaust.
-
-
A Miss
- By FritzFamily on 10-06-21
-
A Lush and Seething Hell
- Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
- By: John Hornor Jacobs
- Narrated by: Almarie Guerra, MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The award-winning and critically-acclaimed master of horror returns with a pair of chilling tales - both never-before-published in print or audio - that examine the violence and depravity of the human condition. Bringing together his acclaimed novella The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky and an all-new short novel My Heart Struck Sorrow, John Hornor Jacobs turns his fertile imagination to the evil that breeds within the human soul.
-
-
Great idea, tarnished by modern politics
- By Phil on 04-28-21
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
-
Mr. Palomar
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman's breasts, or a gorilla's behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception.
-
-
This is an AMAZING Book!
- By The on 09-13-19
By: Italo Calvino
-
Fantastic Tales
- Visionary and Everyday
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 23 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a 20th-century master of the speculative.
-
-
Unexpected pleasure
- By Grant on 11-06-20
By: Italo Calvino
-
The Complete Cosmicomics
- Translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, & William Weaver
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator, Tim Parks - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical, and wise, these 34 dazzling stories - collected here in one definitive anthology - relate complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world.
-
-
Moments of Greatness = Worth the Read
- By Amazon Customer on 08-06-18
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
Under the Jaguar Sun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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
-
Marcovaldo
- or The Seasons in the City (Translated by William Weaver)
- By: Italo Calvino, William Weaver - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams - but the results are never the expected ones.
-
-
Perfect narrator and wonderful story
- By Drew on 12-17-17
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
-
Mr. Palomar
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman's breasts, or a gorilla's behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception.
-
-
This is an AMAZING Book!
- By The on 09-13-19
By: Italo Calvino
-
Fantastic Tales
- Visionary and Everyday
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 23 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a 20th-century master of the speculative.
-
-
Unexpected pleasure
- By Grant on 11-06-20
By: Italo Calvino
-
The Complete Cosmicomics
- Translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, & William Weaver
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator, Tim Parks - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical, and wise, these 34 dazzling stories - collected here in one definitive anthology - relate complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world.
-
-
Moments of Greatness = Worth the Read
- By Amazon Customer on 08-06-18
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
Under the Jaguar Sun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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
-
Marcovaldo
- or The Seasons in the City (Translated by William Weaver)
- By: Italo Calvino, William Weaver - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams - but the results are never the expected ones.
-
-
Perfect narrator and wonderful story
- By Drew on 12-17-17
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
Numbers in the Dark
- And Other Stories
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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
-
Why Read the Classics?
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
The Road to San Giovanni
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema, and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language, and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance.
By: Italo Calvino
-
The Path to the Spider's Nests
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italo Calvino was only 23 when he first published this bold and imaginative novel. It tells the story of Pin, a cobbler's apprentice in a town on the Ligurian coast during World War II. He lives with his sister, a prostitute, and spends as much time as he can at a seedy bar where he amuses the adult patrons. After a mishap with a Nazi soldier, Pin becomes involved with a band of partisans. Calvino's portrayal of these characters, seen through the eyes of a child, is not only a revealing commentary on the Italian resistance but an insightful coming-of-age story.
-
-
How unique to use a child’s viewpoint of war.
- By BBWrighter on 07-17-24
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
The Cloven Viscount
- Translated by Archibald Colquhoun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
By: Italo Calvino
-
Difficult Loves
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Difficult Loves, Italy's master storyteller weaves tales in which cherished deceptions and illusions of love-including self-love-are swept away in magical instants of recognition. A soldier is reduced to quivering fear by the presence of a full-figured woman in his train compartment; a young clerk leaves a lady's bed at dawn; a young woman is isolated from bathers on a beach by the loss of her bikini bottom. Each of them discovers hidden truths beneath the surface of everyday life.
-
-
classic
- By JBeirens on 10-10-24
By: Italo Calvino
-
Into the War
- By: Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino's memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini's army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino's only works of autobiographical fiction.
By: Martin McLaughlin, and others
-
Hermit in Paris
- Autobiographical Writings
- By: Martin McLaughlin translator, Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This posthumously published collection offers a unique, puzzle-like portrait of one of the postwar era's most inventive and mercurial writers. In letters and journals, occasional pieces and interviews, Italo Calvino recalls growing up in seaside Italy and fighting in the antifascist resistance during World War II, traces the course of his literary career, and reflects on his many travels, including a journey through the United States in 1959 and 1960.
By: Martin McLaughlin translator, and others
-
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
- By: Italo Calvino, Geoffrey Brock - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
The Written World and the Unwritten World
- Essays
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit of prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world.
By: Italo Calvino
-
Italian Folktales
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 28 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Chosen as one of the New York Times's 10 best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists.
-
-
At Last: Unbridled Delight
- By John on 06-12-20
By: Italo Calvino
-
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Uneven but worth listening to if you like Calvino
- By Daniel on 02-21-24
By: Italo Calvino