Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–9), the Cosmicomics short stories collection (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972; Folio 2023) and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). Calvino was originally engaged by his publisher, Einaudi, to select and retell stories from the Italian oral tradition to demonstrate Italy’s wealth of folk and fairy tales compared with the better-known traditions of Northern Europe. This work was published in 1956 as Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales, Folio 2019), and it established Calvino as a worthy rival to the monumental Brothers Grimm, Perrault, et al. Calvino was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death in 1985.
Jeanette Winterson is the author of ten novels, including Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1985), The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989); a book of short stories, The World and Other Places (1988); a collection of essays, Art Objects (1995); and a memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011), as well as many other works, including children’s books, screenplays and articles. Her writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Prix d’Argent at the Cannes Film Festival.