If you feel like there’s not enough room for whimsy in the world right now, if you feel like you need a little unironic delight in the power of the imagination, then consider giving Italo Calvino’s brilliant and bizarre anti-novel, INVISIBLE CITIES, a read.
It’s a collection of 55 short prose poems in which the Venetian traveler Marco Polo regales his boss, Kublai Khan, emperor of the Tartars, with tales of the various cities in his kingdom. It’s a Lonely Planet guide jumbled with a book of fables, stirred with an atlas, and marinated in a tank of psilocybin. It’s dream-fuel that offers something new and marvelous each time you sit down with it.
To mark the book’s 50th anniversary, Mariner Classics has a wonderful new edition, out today, including gorgeous illustrations by Karina Puente Frantzen (and a brand-new intro by me). Learn more here!
Incredible to deliver the commencement address (twice!) at the University of Idaho in my beloved home state. What a privilege to celebrate the extraordinary class of 2024.
Very proud to have to drafted this message for Harrison Ford and the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation for Earth Day 2024.
Cloud Cuckoo Land has won the 2022 Grand prix de littérature américaine (France).
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