Italo Calvino

SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM is the text to a series of lectures which became an obsession for Italo Calvino in the last year of his life. Drawing on the works of Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Falubert, Kundera, Perec and many more, he pinpoints the universal laws and indispensable literary values future generations might cherish -lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. It is an eloquent and lively 'defence' of literature - a fitting gift for the next millennium.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Where is the “re readin” option? 2009-2023 🤤

Crick

Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant précis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in1985, of a brain hemorrhage.

Savas Yazici

Six undelivered Norton lectures sum up the nature of literature and describe characteristics that the author would like to see bequeathed to those who live in the next millennium

Ri Liu

Capucine Fachot

Moray Lyle McIntosh

A collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was preparing to deliver at the time of his death, setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued, and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Together, these "memos" form a stirring defense of literature and an indispensable guide to Calvino's own work.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

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