If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller

by Italo Calvino

First published 2023

A reader sits down to enjoy a new novel, but the pages are mysteriously blank. Undaunted, he seeks out the original manuscript, plunging into a meta-fictional maze where reality and fiction blur. As he navigates a web of authorial identities and nested narratives, he confronts his own role as a reader and the nature of storytelling itself. Will he ever find the story he set out to read?

Genres: literary-fiction, novels, 20th-century, contemporary, 21st-century, books-about-books, academic

Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking

Tropes: meta-narrative, unreliable-narrator

Period: 20th-century, 21st-century

288 pages · Hardcover · Vintage Classics

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