Castle of Crossed Destinies

Italo Calvino (1923-1985) is regarded as one of the most influential and imaginative writers of the post-war twentieth century. Best-known for his genre-bending, experimental fictions Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Calvino forged a style that was predicated on the playful and surreal aspects of the literary imagination.

"The interlinking of tales is incredibly complex and subtle: a history of all human consciousness through the myths of Oedipus, Parsifal, Faust, Hamlet and so on. The Castle of Crossed destinies is a shamelessly original work of art-beautiful in the sense that it is the careful statement of an artist we have learned to trust" New Yorker "Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found this special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere" -- Gore Vidal "The marriage of the verbal and the visual in The Castle of Crossed Destinies seems almost prodigious. It is as if sulpher and mercury had at last fused into gold" Times Literary Supplement