This collection of playful, deadly fables is populated with waifs and strays, a gluttonous thief and a mischievous gardener. The grimly comic story The Argentine Ant moved Gore Vidal to declare 'if this is not a masterpiece of twentieth-century prose writing, I cannot think of anything better'.
- Adam, One Afternoon
- The Enchanted Garden
- Father to Son
- A Goatherd at Luncheon
- Leaving Again Shortly
- The House of the Beehives
- Fear on the Footpath
- Hunger at Bévera
- Going to Headquarters
- The Crow Comes Last
- One of the Three is Still Alive
- Animal Wood
- Seen in the Canteen
- Theft in a Cake Shop
- Dollars and the Demi-Mondaine
- Sleeping Like Dogs
- Desire in November
- A Judgment
- The Cat and the Policeman
- Who Put the Mine in the Sea?
- The Argentine Ant
Author
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
