Filled with kings and peasants, saints and ogres-as well as some quite extraordinary plants and animals-these two hundred tales bring to life Italy's folklore, sometimes with earthy humor, sometimes with noble mystery, and sometimes with the playfulness of sheer nonsense. Selected and retold by one of the country's greatest literary icons.

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. "Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has...

Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story...