If On A Winters Night A Traveler Italo Calvino by Italo Calvino 9781784870614, 1784870617 instant download after payment.

Italo Calvino's masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book's central character. 

“The single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick’s career.”  —  New York Times

Based on a witty analogy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book are constantly and comically frustrated.  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 literature, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.

"Calvino is that very rare phenomenon, a true original... If on a winter’s night a traveler is breathtakingly complex and self-conscious (there are moments when it quite literally makes one gasp with astonishment)... [yet it] is one of the most accessible and enchanting novels written in the last fifty years.”  -  from an Introduction by Peter Washington

The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches - stories of menace, spies, mystery, and premonition - with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile, the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If On A Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."