Why Read the Classics?

Like John Updike, Italo Calvino was not only a prolific, world-class writer of fiction, but a keen critic of literature, as well as a distinguished editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi. In "Why Read The Classics?" (eleven of the thirty-six essays have previously appeared in English but have here been re-translated) Calvino gives us immediately relevant and elegantly accessible ruminations on timeless, canonical and period writers spanning more than two and one-half millennia, including: Homer, Ovid, Xenophon, Pliny, Nezami, Ariosto, Cardano, Voltaire, Diderot, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stevenson, Conrad, Pasternak, Gadda, Montale, Hemmingway, Ponge, Borges, Queneau, PaveseFor your delectation, a classic defined. From "Why Read The Classics?: ""A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off."