"After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work," Italian novelist and short story writer Italo Calvino announced in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium. "I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language." Taking this as his guiding principle, it is no accident that Calvino is best known for the monumental collection of Italian fables he edited as well as for the fable-like short stories, novellas, and novels he wrote. That elemental and ancient structure of fiction became, in Calvino's hand, a sophisticated tool for challenging...