If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel.” So begins one of the most inventive and delightful novels ever written: a book about the pleasure of reading that is itself a pleasure to read. You, the Reader, keep starting novels that break off at the most exciting moment, and the search for continuations leads you through ten different beginnings and one unforgettable love story.

Why Start Here

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is the best entry point to Calvino because it is simultaneously his most experimental and most accessible work. The premise is irresistible: you buy a new Calvino novel, but a printing error means the pages repeat, and when you try to get a replacement, you discover a different novel entirely. Each of the ten embedded beginnings is a brilliant pastiche of a different genre, from thriller to literary fiction to Japanese erotica, and the frame narrative about your quest to finish the book becomes a love story and a meditation on why we read at all.

The novel is funny, suspenseful, and deeply aware of the relationship between writer and reader. It works whether you have read one novel or a thousand. Calvino writes with the lightness of a magician who lets you see the trick and somehow makes it more wondrous.

What to Expect

A novel made of ten beginnings and a connecting frame story. The structure is unusual but the reading experience is pure pleasure. Each chapter shifts genre and voice. The tone is playful and warm. Can be read straight through or savored a chapter at a time.