Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice.

Leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary, and a quest.

A collection of stories about the evolution of the universe.

A couple on a journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him - sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him.

A collection of short stories covering the length of the author's writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. It includes fables; a town where everything has been forbidden apart from the game of tip-cat; and a pitiable tribe watching the flight paths of guided missiles from outside their mud huts.

Includes five autobiographical meditations that delves into the author's past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists.

A collection of stories that follows the adventures of a cast of characters. It includes Smog and A Plunge into Real Estate , as well as other eleven tales.

Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of lightness, quickness, multiplicity, exactitude and visibility in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale.

A collection of nineteenth-century fantastic literature - from enchantments and horrors to subtler, psychological terrors. It includes Hoffmann's The Sandman , Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and Dickens' The Signal-Man , and works from celebrated writers including Honore de Balzac, Henry James, Sir Walter Scott and Guy de Maupassant.

Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic, this collection provides the author's criticism.

A postmodern novel which combines a love and a detective story with a sardonic dissection of the publishing industry in an allegory of reading. Two readers attempt to finish the same book, but are comically and repeatedly frustrated.

A collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. It charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider.

Turns the 78 tarot cards to a new purpose, linking word and image to the purposes of narrative. A band of travellers, trapped in an gloomy castle in the heart of a wood, find themselves struck dumb and are only able to converse by using the tarot cards to tell one another how they came to be there.

Contains stories which range geographically from Corsica and Sicily to Venice and the Alps.

A triptych of novels in one volume. Viscount Medardo is bisected by a cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, aged 12, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; and Charlemagne's knight, Agiluf, is an empty suit of armour.

A volume of posthumously collected personal writings of the author, from the early 1950s to his last interview, completed just before his sudden death in 1985. Apart from shedding light on his own formative experiences and evolution as an author, this work also examines the major events of twentieth century history from a personal viewpoint.

Focuses a probing eye on one man's (Mr Palomar's) attempt to name the parts of his universe, almost as though he were trying to define and explain his own existence.

Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler's assistant, both arrogant and insecure who - while the Second World War rages - sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the grown-ups of his town - particularly jokes about his sister, who they all know as the town's 'mattress'.