
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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- 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
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Fantastic Tales
- Visionary and Everyday
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 23 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Unexpected pleasure
- By Grant on 11-06-20
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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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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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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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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The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
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Mythologies
- The Complete Edition, in a New Translation
- By: Roland Barthes, Annette Lavers - translator, Richard Howard - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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When Roland Barthes's groundbreaking Mythologies first appeared in English in 1972, it was immediately recognized as one of the most significant works in French theory - yet nearly half of the essays from the original work were missing. This new edition of Mythologies is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic. It includes the brilliant "Astrology", never published in English before.
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Fun and engaging
- By Chris Hall on 01-08-19
By: Roland Barthes, and others
What listeners say about The Complete Cosmicomics
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-03-23
Unlike anything I’ve ever read
These stories hilariously place you into the minds of many different types of beings across space and time.
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- Andre
- 08-01-23
Calvino Had Me Laughing
Calvino is so ingenious and imaginative that he had me laughing throughout his superb collection, The Complete Cosmicomics. I couldn't help but smile. The smile inevitably turned to a laugh out loud. He is genuinely one of the 20th century's great storytellers.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-26-23
A bunch of rambling nonsense.
I really liked, If on a winter's night a traveler. But not this, disappointing and a waste of a credit.
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- mike
- 11-14-21
Hated this.
Had to read for a college English honors class and I genuinely thought this was truly awful. But in the words of Jim Carey as The Grinch “One mans toxic sludge is another mans potpourri”. Enjoy.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-06-18
Moments of Greatness = Worth the Read
Interwoven between science and fiction, Calvino transports us to another dimension where the laws of physics in our own society do not necessarily apply. Calvino has moments of great beauty in the Cosmicomics, but there are also vast distances he tries to connect in his literal translation of fiction science. His story telling, creativity, and reconfiguration of the laws of physics bring a whirlwind of fun and sometimes confusing adventure. The moments of brilliance are worth the grandiose expanse of fumbling science and confusing story telling. Go forth with Qwefquik
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2 people found this helpful