Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Six Memos for the Next Millennium
    Six Memos for the Next Millennium
    Six Memos for the Next Millennium
    Audiobook3 hours

    Six Memos for the Next Millennium

    Written by Italo Calvino

    Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, drawing examples from his vast knowledge of myth, folklore, and works both ancient and modern.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 25, 2017
    ISBN9781501963551
    Author

    Italo Calvino

    Italo Calvino nació en 1923 en Santiago de las Vegas (Cuba). A los dos años la familia regresó a Italia para instalarse en San Remo (Liguria). Publicó su primera novela animado por Cesare Pavese, quien le introdujo en la prestigiosa editorial Einaudi. Allí desempeñaría una importante labor como editor. De 1967 a 1980 vivió en París. Murió en 1985 en Siena, cerca de su casa de vacaciones, mientras escribía Seis propuestas para el próximo milenio. Con la lúcida mirada que le convirtió en uno de los escritores más destacados del siglo XX, Calvino indaga en el presente a través de sus propias experiencias en la Resistencia, en la posguerra o desde una observación incisiva del mundo contemporáneo; trata el pasado como una genealogía fabulada del hombre actual y convierte en espacios narrativos la literatura, la ciencia y la utopía.

    More audiobooks from Italo Calvino

    Related to Six Memos for the Next Millennium

    Related audiobooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      On Writing Poems Facing Into The Broken World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Al

      16 min read

    • Article

      REMAINING SILENT The facts

      Mar 1, 2020

      Sometime in 1985, I sit at a table in a college library among tall metal shelves, gray or green, that squeak if you lean against them or slide a heavy book across the horizontal rims, a rinse of dust always in the air. I’ve pulled out a large art boo

      14 min read

    • Article

      Alive In The Ice And Fire

      Nov 1, 2018

      A Conversation August, 2018 SUSAN STEWART As I read your books, including If You Have to Go, I am struck, as I’m sure any reader would be, by their existential immediacy. You write in time as you undergo time, taking up especially the unfolding of ev

      17 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jennifer S. Cheng

      Dec 21, 2021

      This list, culled to 10 entries, is a history of care and tenderness these past several months. It traces a web of connections against the distances of the moment. The post A Year in Reading: Jennifer S. Cheng appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Wide Question

      Aug 18, 2021

      The Wide Question
      15 min read

    • Article

      If I Had a Sense of Beauty

      Dec 5, 2017

      If I Had a Sense of Beauty
      14 min read

    • Article

      An Interview With Bianca Stone

      May 1, 2023

      An Interview With Bianca Stone
      11 min read

    • Article

      Hearing Voices and Talking Back: On Bibliomancy

      Mar 29, 2018

      I. Bibliomancy is a form of divination in which one consults a book for answers and advice. The process is simple: Stand the book up on its spine. Ask your question. Let the book fall open to a random page. With your eyes closed, place your finger on

      7 min read

    • Article

      VAGRANT & VULNERABLE

      Aug 16, 2017

      VAGRANT & VULNERABLE
      11 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: June 2020

      Jun 5, 2020

      Our own Nick Ripatrazone takes a look at four notable books of poetry publishing this month. The post Must-Read Poetry: June 2020 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      The World The Book Can Build

      Oct 13, 2021

      The World The Book Can Build
      12 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: May 2018

      May 2, 2018

      Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in May. Tropic of Squalor by Mary Karr Scorched, palpable, sometimes pungent, sometimes brutal: Karr’s new collection is a mixture of tight narratives that end without resolution, hymns of unsettled suf

      6 min read

    • Article

      Vagrant & Vulnerable

      Aug 16, 2017

      Vagrant & Vulnerable
      12 min read

    • Article

      It’s Not You, It’s Me

      Sep 1, 2021

      Like many of you reading this, I mispronounced words growing up that I first encountered in books. These words gained a life of their own in the quiet hallways of my mind. This internal sense of sound and language had a tendency to trump the world’s,

      6 min read

    • Article

      Ain’t That Pretty at All; Or, Going to the Tigers

      Oct 28, 2022

      Like most people, I would often prefer to be someone else. Ideally, the prose this other self would write would not be like mine at all. The post Ain’t That Pretty at All; Or, Going to the Tigers appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Writing Wisdom of Derek Walcott

      Mar 20, 2017

      “The future happens,” says the philosopher in Derek Walcott’s stage retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, “No matter how much we scream.” Walcott died on Friday at the age of 87—and instead of screaming, I’m feeling grateful towards this great poet, playwrig

      7 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: October 2017

      Oct 3, 2017

      Poetry is malleable and moving; a form that will never tire of importance. The post Must-Read Poetry: October 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Daniel Levin Becker

      Dec 17, 2019

      This year, I read in twos. Maybe this is always happening and I just started noticing. I also have a brain that’s unrepentantly hungry for patterns, so who knows. The post A Year in Reading: Daniel Levin Becker appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Six Memos for the Next Millennium

    4/5

    275 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

      Calvino's posthumous lectures are a grand gallop across a cherished earth of letters. The Six Memos For The Next Millennium are a celebration of Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity (the sixth was never written at the time of Calvino's passing). The ruminations and citations extend from Ovid and Lucretius onward through Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cyrano, Valery, Flaubert, Musil and, especially, Borges. This is a wonderful construction, one without grandiosity, but teeming with an organic eloquence.

      Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he ahs the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times--noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring--belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.
    • 4/5
      In the five essays here (the sixth went unwritten because of the author's death), we are pointed towards a great variety of authors, ancient and modern, whose work exemplified one aspect of artistic value: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. Calvino includes himself in the fifth chapter and it is both sad and fascinating to speculate on what it tells us what direction he might have continued his writing had he lived. It will send a Goodreads member interested in such matters off to seek out the books mentioned.
    • 5/5
      A brilliant set of reflections on literature, art, historical development of ideas and modern times. Deserving of a reading once a year at least.
    • 4/5
      Calvino famous last speeches - he actually died before finishing the 6th and last one - in his light and clear style and literature analyse of what he considered would be the most important traits for literature in the XXI Century.