The Complete Cosmicomics (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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." Through the calculations begun by Edwin P Hubble on the galaxies' velocity of recession, we can establish the moment when all the universe's matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space.

There’s a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there’s an element of the smokescreen to it. It’s quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got up to, isn’t it? During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. He succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity. As for my first translations of Hong Kong literature, I translated an essay by Leung Ping-kwan called “Confronting the Multiple Deaths of the Chinese Language,” followed by a couple of Xi Xi’s poems. Interestingly, all of these works are centered around language. Leung’s essay laments the various “deaths” of the Chinese language, whereas the first Xi Xi poems I translated celebrate and play with the malleability of language. I fell so much in love with the way that Xi Xi delights in language that I ended up translating an entire book of her poems. While translating work that hinges on language play is daunting, it’s extremely rewarding to be able to push the limits of English. JF: That issue serves as a testament to Xi Xi’s cultural impact, featuring many younger authors’ rewritings of her famous poems and stories. Note, please, the sardines. They are characteristic of and essential to Calvino's method and style. The story unfolds from this opening perfectly logically - at least if your definition of logic includes, as surely it should, not only modern astrophysics but Zeno's paradox, Borges' Aleph, and the Mad Hatter's tea party.In the postwar period the Italian literary world was deeply committed to politics, and Turin, an industrial capital, was a focal point. Calvino joined the Italian Communist Party and reported on the Fiat company for the party’s daily newspaper.

Cosmicomics is a collection of twelve short stories by Italo Calvino first published in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. Each story takes a scientific "fact" (though sometimes a falsehood by today's understanding), and builds an imaginative story around it. Fortunately, opportunities to publish Hong Kong literature in English translation are increasing. The Hong Kong Atlas book series, spearheaded by Christopher Mattison, has cast a spotlight on translated poetry and fiction from the territory. Partnering with presses in Hong Kong and the US, the first round of the project features both established and emerging voices. And the Penguin Specials Hong Kong Series includes translations of Hong Kong literature into English as well as Hong Kong literature originally composed in English. Most recently, John Minford has joined forces with The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and Columbia University Press to publish the Hong Kong Literature Series, showcasing pioneering authors such as Leung Ping-kwan, Xi Xi, and Liu Yichang. In 1956 Calvino published a seminal collection of Italian folktales. The following year he brought out The Baron in the Trees, and in 1959 The Nonexistent Knight. These two stories, with The Cloven Viscount, have been collected in the volume Our Ancestors. In 1965 he published Cosmicomics, and in 1979 his novel (or antinovel) If on a Winter’s Night a Travelerappeared. The last works published during his lifetime were Mr. Palomar(1983), a novel, and Difficult Loves(1984), a collection of stories.

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Do you begin with a small group of unrelated ideas or a larger conception that you gradually fill in? Twelve dazzling stories from Calvino, where his ambition here was to create a ludic fiction that could reflect complex advances in science without losing his playful nature and sense of magic and lightness. The stories he wrote were direct attempts to assimilate new thinking in cosmology in recognisably human - and comic - dimensions. The Distance of the Moon", the first and probably the best known story. Calvino takes the fact that the Moon used to be much closer to the Earth, and builds a story about a love triangle among people who used to jump between the Earth and the Moon, in which lovers drift apart as the Moon recedes. Do you always have a set task, something specific you decide to work on? Or do you have various things going on at once?

As outlandish as this all sounds, McEwan is not the first novelist to push the boundaries when it comes to unusual narrators. His foetus is preceded by a rich lineage of unexpected narrative voices and unusual points of view, each of which provides a unique perspective on the story they’re telling. Wong Yi’s recent Cantonese chamber opera libretto (music composed by Daniel Lo), Women Like Us, was adapted from two of Xi Xi’s short stories “A Woman Like Me” and “The Cold.” In translating the surtitles for the opera, I found myself not only rereading Xi Xi’s stories but also falling down numerous rabbit holes related to the multiple intertextual references Xi Xi makes in both works. Wong Yi’s libretto inscribes new meanings onto these stories, changing the characters’ fates. In her forthcoming short fiction collection Ways to Love in a Crowded City, Wong Yi also rewrites “The Cold” as a short story set in the present day, updating Xi Xi’s tragic love story for the twenty-first century—for example, whereas Xi Xi’s story alludes to classical Chinese poetry, Wong Yi’s adaptation cites contemporary Cantonese pop songs. Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures. This is a scholarly work, grounded in many years of research of Russian-language archival sources available in the post-Soviet era. It is a fascinating account of the epic achievements and struggles of the USSR’s space programme, from its origins to the 1970s, and enjoyable reading for anyone interested in history as well as space. The Dinosaurs": How some dinosaurs lived after most of them had become extinct, and how it felt to be that last existing dinosaur in an age where all the current mammals feared his kind as demons.Mi è piaciuto questo esercizio di immaginazione, il tono ironico di Qfwfq, nonostante i racconti possano annoiare molto in alcune parti: per esempio, nel riproporre una storia d’amore in quasi ogni racconto, anche quando magari si sarebbero create le basi per un altro tipo di svolgimento narrativo, oppure nel descrivere lo Spazio dettagliatamente, ma ripetendosi e cercando l’effetto ironico in queste ripetizioni. I am fascinated by Collins, by the absolute loneliness of his solitary orbits around the moon while his crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the surface during the Apollo 11 mission. This is his autobiography – and it is honest, humble, unafraid to delve into the details. My favourite quote from the book: “I have not been able to do these things because of any great talent I possess; rather, it has all been the roll of the dice, the same dice that cause the growth of cancer cells, or an aircraft ejection seat to work or not.” Without Colors": Before there was an atmosphere, everything was the same shade of gray. As the atmosphere appears, so do colors. The novelty scares off Ayl, Qfwfq's love interest.