| Despite Calvino’s reputation as a postmodernist, his imagination was more in tune with pre-modern literary modes.  Illustration by Daniele Castellano In an astounding critical essay in this week’s issue, Merve Emre invites the reader on a journey into the pages of Italo Calvino, whom she says was “word for word, the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century.” Imagine you slip unnoticed into a neighborhood bookstore, someplace you pass often but have never entered, drawn to a particular book, your eye fixed “on its pure-white cover and on a curious shape cut into it.” From there, Emre conjures a deepening adventure, part close reading and part dream: “At first, you believed you were reading a fable, but it soon turned into a quest, then a romance, then a utopia, with each episode as dramatic as the one that came before it. You felt that you were not reading a book at all but being whirled around a great library of books: here you glimpsed the beginning of one story, there the middle of another. But the end? The end was nowhere in sight.” Help shape the future of the New Yorker app. Take a brief survey » | 
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