Fantastic Metropolis

We have reached (or are reaching) the end of literature. Our age is the last to have much use for fiction. The ranks of readers are becoming exclusively staffed with writers, who cannot read without some awareness of technique, an awareness which negates the transparency of fiction and subverts its whole ethos. Prose has lost its original meaning and though new meaning is to be found in meta-fiction, this can only last until the techniques of life outweigh those of possible literatures. Italo Calvino has hastened the inevitable apocalypse in the most stylish fashion, his jostling implausibilities melting the core of the imagined world. Before long, one of his heirs will write the last page and then it will be time to close the book for good.

Selected Bibliography (English Translation)

• The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1956
• Adam, One Afternoon (stories), 1957
• Baron in the Trees, 1959
• Italian Fables (comp.), 1959
• The Non-Existent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, 1962
• Cosmicomics (stories), 1968
• Time and the Hunter (stories), 1969
• Invisible Cities, 1974
• The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1977
• Our Ancestors (contains The Cloven Viscount, Baron in the Trees and The Non-Existent Knight), 1980
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, 1981
• Marcovaldo (stories), 1983
• Difficult Loves (stories), 1985
• Mr Palomar (stories), 1985
• The Literature Machine (essays), 1987
• Under the Jaguar Sun (stories), 1992
• The Road to San Giovanni (essays), 1993
• Numbers in the Dark (stories), 1995