Six Memos for the Next Millennium
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At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on his Charles Eliot Norton poetry lectures to be delivered the following year at Harvard University. The six planned lectures would define the qualities he most valued in writing, and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Six Memos for the Next Millennium collects the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature, but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself.
He devotes one “memo” each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, drawing examples from his vast knowledge of myth, folklore, and works both ancient and modern. Written in the mid-1980s, these lectures have proven to be astonishingly prescient as we have entered Calvino’s “next millennium”.
“One of the most rigorously presented and beautifully illustrated critical testaments in all of literature.”—Boston Globe
“A key to Calvino’s own work and a thoroughly delightful and illuminating commentary on some of the world’s greatest writing.”—San Francisco Chronicle
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ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.
GEOFFREY BROCK is an award-winning American poet and translator. His first book of poems, Weighing Light, received the New Criterion Poetry Prize in 2005. His awards include a Wallace Stegner fellowship from Stanford University, a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Cullman Center fellowship from the New York Public Library. He is also a leading translator of Italian poetry and prose, having brought into English major works by Cesare Pavese, Umberto Eco, Roberto Calasso, and others.
