The posthumously published collection Hermit in Paris draws together an array of Italo Calvino’s autobiographical writings that provide an illuminating and unexpectedly intimate portrait of one of the postwar era’s most inventive and fascinating writers. In these pages, Calvino recounts his experiences in Italy’s antifascist resistance, pays homage to his influences, traces the evolution of his literary style, and, in one of the book’s most humorous and entertaining sections, provides a wry commentary on his travels in the United States in 1959 and 1960.
Want Not is a highly inventive and corrosively funny story of our times, a three-pronged tale of human excess that sifts through the detritus of several disparate lives, all conjoined in their come-hell-or-high-water search for fulfillment. As the novel opens on Thanksgiving Day, readers are telescoped into the worlds of a freegan couple living off the grid in Manhattan, a once-prominent linguist struggling with midlife, and a New Jersey debt-collection magnate with a second chance at getting things right. Want and desire propel each one forward on their paths toward something, anything more, but when their worlds collide, briefly, randomly, yet irrevocably, the weight of that wanting ultimately undoes each of them, leaving them to pick up the pieces from what’s left behind.