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Illustrated 50th Anniversary Edition - With an introduction by #1 New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anthony Doerr
A beautiful new illustrated hardcover in the Mariner Classics line: Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels-a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed...
In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo-Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: stories about memory and desire, art and creation, life and death. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor realizes these fantastic places are more familiar than they appear.
With a brilliant new introduction from Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr, and dreamlike illustrations of the cities interspersed throughout, this edition breathes new life into Calvino's classic, a celebration of the story's profound invention and enduring insight.
About the author
Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was born in Cuba and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He began as an essayist and a journalist but is best known for his fiction, including Invisible Cities, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Marcovaldo, and Mr. Palomar.
ANTHONY DOERR is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. He is also the author of the two story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won four O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
Summary
Illustrated 50th Anniversary Edition • With an introduction by #1 New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Anthony Doerr
A beautiful new illustrated hardcover in the Mariner Classics line: Italo Calvino’s beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor’s travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed…
In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: stories about memory and desire, art and creation, life and death. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor realizes these fantastic places are more familiar than they appear.
With a brilliant new introduction from Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr, and dreamlike illustrations of the cities interspersed throughout, this edition breathes new life into Calvino’s classic, a celebration of the story’s profound invention and enduring insight.
Report
"Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant." - Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books
"Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island." - Jeanette Winterson
"Italy's most original storyteller...Invisible Cities is an elegy, autumnal and melancholy." - New York Times
"It's best, I think, to read Invisible Cities like a traveler-slowly, luxuriously, as if you have all the time in the world." - NPR
![Italo Calvino, Karina Maria Puente Frantzen - Invisible Cities [50th Anniversary Edition]](https://blob.cede.ch/books/210000000/210807000/210807930_17.jpg?v=2)