Bargain @ $2.99 USD/$3.99 CAD from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, probably just through today only, since HMH tends to rotate their offers monthly (couponable/VIP-eligible in Canada but not the US; prices should be the same at all the usual retailers):
Six Memos for the Next Millenium by the late Italian author Italo Calvino (
Wikipedia), an influential experimental literary novelist and essayist who was a member of the Oulipo creative movement alongside the late Umberto Eco. This is a translation of his posthumous collection of lectures on the subject of various qualities of literature and has its own
Wikipedia entry.
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. Readers will be astonished by the prescience of these lectures, which have only gained in relevance as Calvino’s “next millennium” has dawned.
Also, @ $1.99 each, a few more non-fiction titles by notable literary fiction authors, if you think you might be interested:
- A Wedding in Haiti by Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez (Wikipedia), apparently one of the most influential modern Latin American literature authors (I've read and enjoyed a couple of her novels, and we've even gotten one as a freebie in the past). This is a travelogue memoir about family relationships, out from Algonquin Books (couponable).
- Boone: A Biography & Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion by award-winning poet & novelist Robert Morgan (Wikipedia); biographical histories about various figures of westward settlement in the US, also out from Algonquin Books. Lions of the West was a 2012 SIBA Book Award for non-fiction recipient, according to Wikipedia.
- A Widow's Story: A Memoir by National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates (Wikipedia), about the unexpected sudden death of her first husband, and the ensuing experience of its aftermath, out from HarperCollins (non-couponable).