A Plunge Into Calvino Podcast
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aplungeintocalvino.bsky.social
A Plunge Into Calvino Podcast
@aplungeintocalvino.bsky.social
260 followers 9 following 500 posts
The account of the A Plunge Into Calvino podcast, dedicated to Italo Calvino.

The views expressed here are personal, and not that of my employer.
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aplungeintocalvino.bsky.social
Calvino's still got it.
galtthedragon.bsky.social Galt! 🎈🧸 θΔ @galtthedragon.bsky.social · 4d
Finished reading “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino on a flight, marking the first time I willingly picked up a novel and finished it in like a decade. It was phenomenal, with some beautiful prose (even translated out of Italian) and was incredibly thought-provoking. Highly recommend
November 14, 2025 at 11:47 PM
aplungeintocalvino.bsky.social
Also same.
sarageorgini.bsky.social Sara Georgini @sarageorgini.bsky.social · 7d
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Every time I read it, it’s an engine of change. Historical contingency? The complexity of reading sources and/or translation? All alive there. A great re/read! 🗃️
runwithskizzers.bsky.social Preeti Chhibber @runwithskizzers.bsky.social · 7d
performative reading, lack of reading skills, nobody's reading anymore -- NO!

tell me about a book that changed you

for me? the *extremely* ahistorical novel, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY which I read at 13 and was like, "Oh, art can be *everything* to a maker, for good and bad"
November 12, 2025 at 6:53 PM
aplungeintocalvino.bsky.social
Same.
ceej.online ceej @ceej.online · 7d
the one-two punch of reading If on a winter’s night a traveler and Invisible Cities back to back at nineteen made me feel both like my mind was literally expanding toward a new understanding of what writing could be and more viscerally annoying to be around than ever before
runwithskizzers.bsky.social Preeti Chhibber @runwithskizzers.bsky.social · 7d
performative reading, lack of reading skills, nobody's reading anymore -- NO!

tell me about a book that changed you

for me? the *extremely* ahistorical novel, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY which I read at 13 and was like, "Oh, art can be *everything* to a maker, for good and bad"
November 12, 2025 at 6:52 PM
Reposted by A Plunge Into Calvino Podcast
syntacrobat.xyz
for spooky season this year I wrote about Italo Calvino's remarkable 1967 lecture "Cybernetics and Ghosts", wherein he speculates about whether a machine could ever write great literature. joelgustafson.com/posts/2025-1...
The Orientation Game
Joel Gustafson
joelgustafson.com
October 29, 2025 at 10:08 PM
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falchie.bsky.social
"The Black Sheep", short story by Italo Calvino.

granta.com/the-black-sh...
The Black Sheep
‘And then one day – nobody knows how – an honest man appeared.’ Fiction by Italo Calvino in Granta 46: Crime.
granta.com
October 31, 2025 at 5:17 PM
aplungeintocalvino.bsky.social
I have deleted the podcast from Spotify due to my disagreement with the way the platform's profits are being used. As soon as I have a new host set up I will put it here. Transcripts of the scripted episodes remain on the podcast's WordPress.
October 24, 2025 at 7:38 PM
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40yearsago.bsky.social
Critics praised his ingenuity, blending folk tales, social allegories, and modern fables in works like "Cosmicomics" and "Invisible Cities". Post-WWII, he shifted to invention, exploring dreams, reality, and human absurdity.
September 19, 2025 at 2:03 PM
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jsunbury.bsky.social
Happy Birthday, Italo Calvino! (b.Oct.15, 1923)
Italo Calvino - The Distance From the Moon (1965)
Shulamit Serafy, graphic designer and illustrator, animated film adaptation (2008) of a short story from Calvino's masterpiece 'Cosmicomics' (1965).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ9c...
The distance from the moon - Italo Calvino
YouTube video by shulamits
www.youtube.com
October 15, 2025 at 11:04 AM
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ronaldoags.bsky.social
Italo Calvino was such a handsome man!
October 16, 2025 at 7:36 PM
aplungeintocalvino.bsky.social
Italo Calvino was born 102 years ago today. He was a writer of delights, a fighter of fascism, and possessor of a mind always curious and subtle. Although he died in 1985, he was so far ahead of his times that his work feels like a map of our Invisible Cities and a guide to our Crossed Destinies.
October 15, 2025 at 8:45 PM
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jsunbury.bsky.social
Happy Birthday, Italo Calvino! (b.Oct.15, 1923)
October 15, 2025 at 11:11 AM
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houseofbast777.bsky.social
“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.” ~ Invisible Cities
Born on this day Italian writer Italo Calvino 1923
#Booksky
October 15, 2025 at 12:12 PM
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coolbikeart1.bsky.social
Writer Italo Calvino

#BicycleBirthday
October 15 (1923-1985)
Photo of a man wearing a turtleneck riding a bicycle.
October 15, 2025 at 2:49 PM
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mariapopova.bsky.social
Italo Calvino, born 102 years ago today, on writing – selected wisdom from a lifetime of letters by one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived www.themarginalian.org/2013/06/10/i...
Italo Calvino on Writing: Selected Wisdom from a Lifetime of Letters
“One writes most of all in order to take part in a collective enterprise.”
www.themarginalian.org
October 15, 2025 at 3:28 PM
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sownow.bsky.social
“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.”
Italian writer Italo Calvino was born on this day in 1923.
#WriterSky #Resistance #BOTD
A gifted writer, he held firm to his principles. He despised Mussolini and fascism and, at his mother’s suggestion, joined the resistance. Calvino’s life is punctuated with extraordinary events. After the 2WW, he wrote about combat, communism, and travel. He became a writer’s writer, beloved in Europe and America, where his writing was praised and he was recognized with countless awards. An undated, b/w photo of Italo Calvino Photo Credit: Emilio Ronchini / Mondadori / Getty Image Source: The New Yorker
October 15, 2025 at 4:14 PM
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mariapopova.bsky.social
"The life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself."

An epoch before Instagram, Italo Calvino (who would have been 102 today) wrote so movingly about photography and the art of presence: www.themarginalian.org/2015/10/15/i...
Italo Calvino on Photography and the Art of Presence
“The life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself.”
www.themarginalian.org
October 15, 2025 at 5:05 PM
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storygroup.bsky.social
Italo Calvino (with Jorge Luis Borges) - BOTD
💙📚 #LiteratureSky
October 15, 2025 at 4:43 PM
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munkiman.bsky.social
Remembering journalist & writer (of short stories and novels) Italo Calvino, born October 15, 1923, Santiago de Las Vegas, near Havana, Cuba (d. September 19, 1985). I read If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) in college -- it's a novel every writer & every reader should read. (More: alt text)
Lionised in Britain and the United States, Calvino was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). If on a winter's night a traveler is a postmodern novel by Italian author Italo Calvino, published in 1979. The book is a sophisticated story-within-a-story that explores the act of reading and the relationship between the reader and the text. The novel's unique structure alternates between two narratives: You, the reader, are the protagonist, addressed in the second person. You purchase a new book, also titled If on a winter's night a traveler, but find it has a printing error and repeats the same section. This leads you on a journey to find the complete book. Interrupted stories: In your search, you are repeatedly given new books, only to find they are also incomplete. In total, you encounter the first chapters of 10 different, unfinished novels, each in a different style and genre. Your quest leads you to a bookshop, where you meet Ludmilla, another reader having the same problem. Your parallel efforts to track down the complete stories evolve into a love story. The search for the "correct" book leads you both to investigate an international publishing conspiracy, involving rogue translators, elusive authors, and an entire publishing house. From the very first sentence—"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler."—you are not reading a book. You are being read by it. This is not a novel. It is ten novels. Or maybe none. Or maybe one fractured novel shaped like a prism, each chapter its own exquisite shard of fiction, interrupted just as you begin to fall in. And running through it all, like a taut wire, is you—the Reader—searching for the full story, trying to piece together the endings Calvino refuses to give. But the plot, if you can call it that, is beside the point. The brilliance lies in the premise: each time you begin a new book (within the book), it vanishes, snatched away by accident or misprint or conspiracy, and you must begin again. Always at the beginning. Always unsatisfied. And that’s the quiet, breathtaking genius of it. If on a winter’s night a traveler isn’t about reading stories—it’s about wanting to read stories. The hunger, the frustration, the voyeurism, the seduction. It’s about the physical, erotic, maddening act of reading. And being thwarted. And wanting more. Calvino turns the mechanics of narrative into high art, and then sets it on fire. One moment you’re in a spy thriller, the next a surreal fever dream, the next a philosophical mystery. Each genre is lovingly built and then instantly snatched away, like a dream you wake from just before the climax. He knows your cravings—he creates them—and then denies you the climax in favor of something more dangerous: awareness. Read more from this review here on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=122151646682638475&set=a.122107084802638475
October 15, 2025 at 5:37 PM
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dean.bsky.social
Here’s a fourth!

Italo Calvino by David Levine, 1974

Today we’re celebrating Calvino’s birthday 🎂
Caricature of Calvino with his head in his hands.
October 15, 2025 at 6:29 PM
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dean.bsky.social
In 1960 Raymond Queneau & François Le Lionnais created Oulipo, an experimental writing group that still exists today.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

I've never seen a key for this photo, but I recognize Italo Calvino & Harry Mathews sitting on the left, & Georges Perec behind Queneau.
October 15, 2025 at 2:24 PM
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dean.bsky.social
Gianni Giansanti
Italo Calvino
1984

"If digressions become so complex, so tangled & tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows, perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way & perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places."
Calvino holds a glass globe in his hand; it reflects the scene, but upside down.
October 15, 2025 at 2:20 PM
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dean.bsky.social
Italo Calvino by Sophie Bassouls, Saint Germain des Prés, December 5, 1974

"I wrote 'If on a winter's night a traveler' to show how well I could write if I did not exist."
Calvino stands in a Paris square, bundled up in an overcoat & scarf
October 15, 2025 at 2:15 PM
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dean.bsky.social
"The imagination is a place in which it rains."
- Italo Calvino

📷 Chien-Chi Chang
New York City, June 23rd, 2017
Street scene in New York from inside a vehicle; the view is obscured by raindrops on the windshield.
October 15, 2025 at 2:14 PM
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dean.bsky.social
“Italo Calvino was, word for word, the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century.”
- Merve Emre, from a fine article in the New Yorker

newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Love the illustration by Daniele Castellano
Portrait of Calvino superimposed on architectural features of various cities
October 15, 2025 at 2:12 PM
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dean.bsky.social
Remembering Italo Calvino on his birthday 🎂
📷 Ulf Andersen, 1984

"Architect of scrupulously imagined, apparently fantastic, insidiously plausible words, Calvino occupies a literary space somewhere east of Jorge Luis Borges & west of Vladimir Nabokov."
- Michael Wood
Three-quarter portrait of the author in a three-piece suit
October 15, 2025 at 2:10 PM