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919b146
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
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words
literature
reading
meaning
classics
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Italo Calvino |
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89ffa1e
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Sections in the bookstore - Books You Haven't Read - Books You Needn't Read - Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading - Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written - Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered - Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First - Books Too Expensive Now and You'l..
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reading
humor
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Italo Calvino |
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cb631cd
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In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certain..
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reading
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Italo Calvino |
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2432fb2
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Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
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Italo Calvino |
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0f69e67
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If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. 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.
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sex
reading
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Italo Calvino |
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c0848ae
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The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst..
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Italo Calvino |
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df329b3
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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.
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Italo Calvino |
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0c27737
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Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of rea..
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reading
italo
winter-s
if
traveler
calvino
on
night
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Italo Calvino |
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5a0928a
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What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
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Italo Calvino |
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81ab2cb
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You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
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Italo Calvino |
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8f2b727
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One reads alone, even in another's presence.
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Italo Calvino |
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29d3579
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Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little."
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venice
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Italo Calvino |
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657d7b1
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In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For ..
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lists
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Italo Calvino |
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516fb7e
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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
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Italo Calvino |
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ab1ab93
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Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
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reading
philosophy-of-life
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Italo Calvino |
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872c893
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the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping...something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, tr..
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Italo Calvino |
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d16f3e2
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This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .
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Italo Calvino |
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ba49d5d
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You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.
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Italo Calvino |
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d3af427
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You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.
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Italo Calvino |
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2386f75
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To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
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Italo Calvino |
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9506c05
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Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say."
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Italo Calvino |
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4d8710f
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L'inferno dei viventi non e qualcosa che sara; se ce n'e uno, e quello che e gia qui, l'inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme. Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accettare l'inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo piu. Il secondo e rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all'inferno, non e inferno, e f..
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Italo Calvino |
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39e18b0
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With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. 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.
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Italo Calvino |
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77552c1
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Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.
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reading
home
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Italo Calvino |
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d7facf9
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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future
missed-opportunities
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Italo Calvino |
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43f8d77
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For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.
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Italo Calvino |
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c000558
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
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Italo Calvino |
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7c00e74
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Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
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Italo Calvino |
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2aa4434
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Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an e..
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Italo Calvino |
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f52cad0
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,' Arkadian Porpirych says. 'What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastim..
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literature
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Italo Calvino |
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e3a3f96
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You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other..
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Italo Calvino |
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a7009f0
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Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.
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Italo Calvino |
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14d91dc
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There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.
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venice
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Italo Calvino |
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9282eb3
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I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to rel..
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reading
object-of-reading
rereading
book-reading
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Italo Calvino |
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daa280f
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There is no language without deceit.
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Italo Calvino |
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4acb715
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Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
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Italo Calvino |
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c49619f
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we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
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Italo Calvino |
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bc004e8
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I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . .
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semiotics
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Italo Calvino |
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5744c31
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The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.
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Italo Calvino |
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45f95dd
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It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
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truth
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Italo Calvino |
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4daf29e
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el infierno de los vivos no es algo que sera; hay uno, es aquel que existe ya aqui, el infierno que habitamos todos los dias, que formamos estando juntos. Dos maneras hay de no sufrirlo. La primera es facil para muchos: aceptar el infierno y volverse parte de el hasta el punto de no verlo mas. La segunda es peligrosa y exige atencion y aprendizaje continuos: buscar y saber reconocer quien y que, en medio del infierno, no es infierno, y hace..
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Italo Calvino |
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d04a3c9
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Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
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reading
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Italo Calvino |
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c964fe8
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I speak and speak," Marco says, "but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the sam..
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Italo Calvino |
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e5a3497
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You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
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Italo Calvino |