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Article: Palookaville.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- November 18, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Most American readers of Italo Calvino are familiar with his later works - his allegorical fables and stylized metafiction, tales that revel in the minute observation of nature and science, in which characters are minor participants in a vastly wondrous universe. Invisible Cities, If on a Winters Night a Traveler and Mr. Palomar are considered small masterpieces of modem fiction; and Calvino was mentioned frequently for the Nobel Prize in Literature until his sudden death in 1985. But on this side of the Atlantic, much less attention has been paid to Calvino's early work, especially his short stories and first novel, The Path to the Nest of the Spiders, published in 1947 ...