The Complete Cosmicomics - Blackwell's Bookshop Online

Before the universe began to expand, when all of everything existed in a single point in space, Qfwfq was there. And afterwards - through the millennia, across galaxies and in different, shifting forms - he persisted. He has some stories to tell. This is a collection of enchanting stories, in revised translation, about the evolution of the universe. The characters, fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures, disport themselves amongst galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and have time for a love life too. 'Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?'.

ISBN	1846141656	DEWEY edition	DC22
ISBN13	9781846141652 (What's this?)	Pages	432
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd	Weight (grammes)	574
Imprint	Penguin Classics	Published in	London
Format	Hardback	Height (mm)	222
Publication date	28 May 2009	Width (mm)	144
Translator	Tim Parks, Patrick Creagh, Martin McLaughlin, William Weaver	Spine width (mm)	39
DEWEY	853.914	Academic level	General

	A Note on the Translations
	Cosmicomics	1
	The Distance of the Moon	3
	At Daybreak	20
	A Sign in Space	32
	All at One Point	43
	Without Colours	49
	Games Without End	61
	The Aquatic Uncle	69
	How Much Shall We Bet?	83
	The Dinosaurs	93
	The Form of Space	112
	The Light-Years	123
	The Spiral	137
	Time and the Hunter	153
Pt. 1	More of Qfwfq	155
	The Soft Moon	157
	The Origin of the Birds	167
	Crystals	180
	Blood, Sea	190
Pt. 2	Priscilla	203
I	Mitosis	209
II	Meiosis	224
III	Death	235
Pt. 3	t zero	241
	t zero	243
	The Chase	258
	The Night Driver	272
	The Count of Monte Cristo	280
	From World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories	295
	The Mushroom Moon	297
	The Daughters of the Moon	307
	More...

'If you have never read Cosmicomics, you have before you ... the most joyful reading experiences of your life' - Salman Rushdie 'Entirely unlike anything that anyone else has written ... In Cosmicomics Calvino makes it possible for the reader to inhabit a meson, a mollusc, a dinosaur; makes him for the first time see light ending a dark universe ... During the last [part of the twentieth] century Italo Calvino ... advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere' - Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books

Be the first to write a customer review