
The Complete Cosmicomics
Translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, & William Weaver
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Narrated by:
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Jefferson Mays
About this listen
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. They are an indelible (and unfailingly delightful) literary achievement.
Translation of "The Distance of the Moon", "At Daybreak", "A Sign in Space", "All at One Point", "Without Colours", "Games Without End", "The Aquatic Uncle", "How Much Shall We Bet?", "The Dinosaurs", "The Form of Space", "The Light-Years", and "The Spiral" copyright © Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. and Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1968
Translation of "The Soft Moon", "The Origin of the Birds", "Crystals", "Blood, Sea", "Mitosis", "Meiosis", "Death", "t zero", "The Chase", "The Night Driver", and "The Count of Monte Cristo" copyright © Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. and Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1969
Translation of "World Memory", "Nothing and Not Much", "Implosion", and "The Other Eurydice" copyright © Tim Parks, 1995
Introduction and translations of "The Mushroom Moon", "The Daughters of the Moon", "The Meterorites", "The Stone Sky", "As Long as the Sun Lasts", "Solar Storm", and "Shells and Time" copyright © Martin McLaughlin, 2009
All rights reserved.
©2002 The Estate of Italo Calvino (P)2017 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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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
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Hermit in Paris
- Autobiographical Writings
- By: Martin McLaughlin translator, Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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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
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Labyrinths
- Selected Stories & Other Writings
- By: Jorge Luis Borges
- Narrated by: Dominic Keating
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labelled Borgesian.
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Look, this is Borges
- By Lars Spuybroek on 05-27-20
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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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Collection of Sand
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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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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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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The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
- By: Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley - editor translator introduction
- Narrated by: Castulo Guerra
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of the twentieth century. Now Borges's remarkable last major story collection, The Book of Sand, is paired with a handful of writings from the very end of his life. Brilliantly translated, these stories combine a direct and at times almost colloquial style coupled with Borges's signature fantastic inventiveness. Containing such marvelous tales as "The Congress," "Undr," "The Mirror and the Mask," and "The Rose of Paracelsus," this edition showcases Borges's depth of vision and superb image-conjuring power.
By: Jorge Luis Borges, and others
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The Road to San Giovanni
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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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
Calvino Had Me Laughing
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Unlike anything I’ve ever read
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A bunch of rambling nonsense.
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Hated this.
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Moments of Greatness = Worth the Read
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