Why Read the Classics_ - Italo Calvino 豆瓣评分[8.60]

Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are thirty-six ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.

Italo Calvino's superb storytelling gifts earned him international renown and a reputation as "one of the world's best fabulists" (New York Times Book Review). He is the author of numerous works of fiction, as well as essays, criticism, and literary anthologies. Born in Cuba in 1923, Calvino was raised in Italy, where he lived most of his life. At the time of his death, in Siena in 1985, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer.

Translator's Introduction
Preface 1
Why Read the Classics? 3
The Odysseys Within The Odyssey 11
Xenophon's Anabasis 19
Ovid and Universal Contiguity 25
The Sky, Man, the Elephant 37
Nezami's Seven Princesses 47
Tirant lo Blanc 53
The Structure of the Orlando Furioso 59
Brief Anthology of Octaves from Ariosto 69
Gerolamo Cardano 77
The Book of Nature in Galileo 83
Cyrano on the Moon 91
Journal of Mercantile Virtues 97
or Concerning Narrative Rapidity 103
Jacques le Fataliste 107
Giammaria Ortes 113
Knowledge as Dust-cloud in Stendhal 119
Guide for New Readers of Stendhal's Charterhouse 131
The City as Novel in Balzac 139
Our Mutual Friend 145
Trois Contes 151
Two Hussars 155
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg 159
Daisy Miller 165
The Pavilion on the Links 169
Conrad's Captains 173
Pasternak and the Revolution 179
The World is an Artichoke 197
The Pasticciaccio 201
'Forse un mattino andando' 209
Montale's Cliff 219
Hemingway and Ourselves 223
Francis Ponge 231
Jorge Luis Borges 237
The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau 245
Pavese and Human Sacrifice 261
Publisher's Note 265
Index 269