Italo Calvino
Italian novelist and short story writerWikipedia
34
MENTIONS
26
EPISODES
24
PODCASTS
Search complete. 34 mentions across 26 episodes found for "Italo Calvino".
Sep 15, 2026
David KohnGUEST
And I know it's a rather purist position to take.
David KohnGUEST
There's this kind of Italo Calvino, you know, why read the classics?
Michael MeredithHOST
Yes.
David KohnGUEST
And it's just there are some books that keep coming back, um, generation after generation as points, discussion points.
Zachary SwezyGUEST
That was awesome, and it also-- it got the wheels turning in my head a little bit.
Zachary SwezyGUEST
Uh, are you familiar with Italo Calvino?
JinHOST
A little bit.
Zachary SwezyGUEST
Yeah, he wrote, uh, Invisible Cities and Cosmic Comics and a number of other things.
Nghi VoGUEST
Okay.
Nghi VoGUEST
Uh, my favorite fictional city comes from the book, uh, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
Nghi VoGUEST
Uh, of course, um, as with anything I love, I can't remember its name, so, uh, I believe it's the city of Clarice.
Nghi VoGUEST
And, um, for anyone who's not familiar with the book, the idea is that Marco Polo is telling, uh, the Kublai Khan about his, uh, travels through the cities of his empire, the empire that Kublai Khan rules but has never seen.
Charlie FordhamHOST
Think Atonement by Ian McEwan.
Charlie FordhamHOST
If you've ever come across any Italo Calvino, so many works of this genre.
Charlie FordhamHOST
of this period are self-reflective.
Charlie FordhamHOST
You know, it's what we call postmodernism, I guess.
Robert MoorGUEST
across cultures.
Robert MoorGUEST
And I was sitting there reading actually a book called The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, which you guys have probably read, and thinking about why did I stop climbing trees? It's a story of a boy who climbs up into a tree and never comes back down, spends his whole life up there.
Robert MoorGUEST
So I went to climb this tree and almost right away was seized by this feeling of vertigo, this feeling of cautiousness.
Robert MoorGUEST
It wasn't just a fear of heights, it was a fear of like, Why am I doing something so stupid? I'd lost that kind of wild tree climbers spirit.
Meghan NesmithGUEST
And a lot of what I was also really excited about in literature was what I would have called magical realism, which is basically just fantasy with a different, more serious name.
Meghan NesmithGUEST
So like, I mean, even Virginia Woolf to a degree is magical realism, Orlando, you know, waking up in an entirely new body, stuff like Garcia Marquez, like Italo Calvino, be like this again, like people who are creating these magical worlds, but doing it under a literary umbrella, which made it feel more acceptable and, And so that's what I was trying to write for a long time.
Meghan NesmithGUEST
I was working on these very epic projects.
Meghan NesmithGUEST
My thesis was this sprawling novel that had an omniscient narrator that was a school of cod.
Jamie MetzlGUEST
But for me, I would have in this cartoon, which is a wonderful idea, like a third thing, which is like, am I making the right choices? While I follow my head and my heart, is there another thing? I mean, I use the idea of possibility of having a child as another narrative, but there are lots of different narratives.
Jamie MetzlGUEST
Italo Calvino has a great short story in his book, Invisible Cities, that a city is a bunch of possibilities.
Jamie MetzlGUEST
And you think of every person living their life, that's one possibility.
Jamie MetzlGUEST
realization of their opportunity set.
speaker_3HOST
We need to personify the void to survive it.
speaker_4HOST
Which brings us to a highly unusual yet brilliant entry on a cosmology reading list, a book of short fiction called Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, published in 1965.
speaker_3HOST
I was so thrilled to see short fiction on this list, and Calvino, his approach is incredibly specific and unique.
speaker_4HOST
The premise is amazing.
speaker_3HOST
The stories are all narrated by this ancient kind of curmudgeonly shape-shifting being who has just been hanging around the cosmos since before the universe properly got going.
speaker_3HOST
He was there before matter existed.
speaker_3HOST
He was there before light was created, and he is just a little bit grumpy about how all of it turned out.
speaker_4HOST
What Calvino accomplishes with this narrative device is brilliant.
Natalie Rotter-LaitmanHOST
[laughs]
Charlie BardeyHOST
It's my book of Italo Calvino.
Natalie Rotter-LaitmanHOST
I know you love this guy.
Natalie Rotter-LaitmanHOST
Does that one look like a woman on its side?
EmilyNARRATOR
The kitchen lights made the walls glow buttery, the last rays of sun slanting through the window we'd once argued about putting plants in.
EmilyNARRATOR
I unplugged the kettle, smoothed the hallway rug, then placed Lena's spare key on the bookshelf beside Nick's battered copy of Calvino.
EmilyNARRATOR
I scanned the mantle, family photos, the wedding snapshot, bits of sea glass and ticket stubs, and pulled out the one of me and Lena on the fire escape, both of us laughing, wine in hand, before any of this started to break apart.
EmilyNARRATOR
I slipped it into my pocket, unable to face the idea of Nick staring at it daily in my absence, or maybe it was the other way around.
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