Invisible Cities

It's a strange, strange book that I think I will return to often. If you liked the world building in Piranesi and want more, this is the book for you. Calvino describes 55 cities in under 200 pages, with each one feeling very different.

on HN, 2023

The book is full of describing some different fictional city (or is it? one passage suggests maybe that's not the case), often with a different theme or flavor of strangeness that might be a metaphor for something in our lives.

on HN, 2022

This book is a puzzle. You could read it front to back, or you could read it in the various different orders. There is no intended order. Again, very dreamy and weird.

on HN, 2023

human life is so rich in complexity and detail that an infinite number of projections can be constructed to study slices of it, that are each worthy of their own story

on HN, 2020

In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly—his hometown. Polo's response: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

on HN, 2022

It’s quite short, but so layered that I actually have a hard time describing it. Framed as a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the book is a series of vignettes describing fantastical cities Polo has visited in his travels.

on HN, 2020

Prose poems, short 1-2 page descriptions of fictional cities. It’s a good gift to give and I like to pick it up at random, open to a random one, and sit with the imagery it conjures.

on HN, 2020