Italo Calvino has long been recognized as one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century. At once experimental and accessible, he is able to fuse sophisticated narrative techniques with pleasurable storytelling. His writing, internationally praised for imagination, humor, and technical virtuosity, is characterized by the interweaving of reality, fantasy, allegory, and fable as well as its treatment of abstract philosophical and scientific ideas and speculation. He has explored subjects ranging from the absurdity of the human condition, to the relationships of time and space and of fantasy and reality, to the nature of writing itself.

Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, on 15 October 1923, where his parents were working as agronomists. Shortly thereafter the family returned to San Remo, Italy, a Ligurian town near France, where Calvino grew up and spent the better part of the next twenty years. He attended public schools, and...