Popular quotes: The meaning an history behind "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
Thanks to Bob Wilks for this week’s excellent quote!
"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
– Italo Calvino
The Italian journalist, short-story writer and novelist Italo Calvino
(1923-1985) was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba. His parents were the
Italian botanists Mario Calvino and Evelina Mameli. Shortly after he was born
they returned to Italy where he grew up in Sanremo on the Italian Riviera.
In 1941 he moved to Turin, and in 1943 joined the Italian Resistance (more than
300,000 Italians joined the Resistance fighting German occupying forces and
Italian fascists); later he joined the (then clandestine) Italian Communist
Party. In 1947 he graduated from Turin University with a thesis on Joseph
Conrad; after which he wrote for the official Communist paper L'Unità,
and also for a weekly cultural magazine, and later the communist weekly
political magazine Rinascita.
In 1957 he unexpectedly left the Communist party and become co-editor of Il
Menabò di letteratura, where he stayed for many years. His first novel
Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947, The Path to the Nest of Spiders),
was inspired by his participation in the Italian Resistance. He turned to
fantasy and allegory in the 1950s, for which he is best remembered.
He traveled widely, lecturing in many countries including France, Japan, Mexico,
and the USA, He won many honors including being made an Honorary Member of the
American Academy and being awarded the prestigious French Légion d'Honneur. He
died in 1985 in Siena of a cerebral hemorrhage.
"Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a
world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb." - Calvino
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
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The Italian journalist, short-story writer and novelist Italo Calvino
(1923-1985) was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba. His parents were the
Italian botanists Mario Calvino and Evelina Mameli. Shortly after he was born
they returned to Italy where he grew up in Sanremo on the Italian Riviera. 
