Description: "In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo--Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: stories about memory and desire, art and creation, life and death. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor realizes these fantastic places are more familiar than they appear." --
Brief description:
Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was born in Cuba and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He began as an essayist and a journalist but is best known for his fiction, including Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Marcovaldo, and Mr. Palomar.
Review Quotes:
"It's best, I think, to read Invisible Cities like a traveler--slowly, luxuriously, as if you have all the time in the world." - NPR
"Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant." - Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books
"Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island." - Jeanette Winterson
"Italy's most original storyteller...Invisible Cities is an elegy, autumnal and melancholy." - New York Times