If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

You are about to read Mark Nicholls’s review of Italo Calvino’s postmodern classic If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. You might want to position yourself in a comfortable chair before you begin, or place a cushion behind your back, as we know how arduous it can be to read things off the internet. Y......more

I say this is what happened: Italo Calvino was suffering from a writer's block. He would start a novel, get it to its first curve and abandon it before the resolution. A few months later he would start another with a similar result. Finally, his publishers got impatient because it had been years sinc......more

I arrived at the library with my two books in hand. As I plunked them down on the check-in counter, a thin matronly woman approached. "Would you like to check these books in?" "Yes I would but I would also like to..." "Oh, I see you read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino." "Yes I did. H......more

Beginning to read a book we always board a train to an unknown destination. Where will it take us and what will we see on our way there? Reading is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measur......more

[Revised 12/4/22] An experimental novel. The main character is a reader who can’t finish a book because the print copies are mixed up and he ends up reading first chapters of various novels over and over again. He meets up with a woman who has the same problem and he goes on a search to find the rest......more