Italo Calvino

Published in 1972, "Invisible Cities" consists of a series of conversational descriptions of 55 fantastical cities told by the explorer Marco Polo to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. All of the surreal cities described are actually metaphorical variations of a single city, Venice.

This 1979 postmodern novel is famous for its second-person narrative, where the "reader" is the main character trying to finish reading a book that keeps getting interrupted. The novel consists of the first chapters of 10 different fictional books.

Calvino began his career writing in the neorealist style, heavily influenced by his time as a partisan fighter during World War II. His first novel, "The Path to the Nest of Spiders," published in 1947, deals directly with the Italian Resistance.

Calvino frequently wrote works that blended fantasy, fable, and magical realism, though he is most commonly classified as a postmodernist. His "Our Ancestors" trilogy, which includes "The Cloven Viscount" and "The Baron in the Trees," uses surreal, fairy-tale logic to explore philosophical and political themes.