Bargain @ $1.99 each in the US only from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Mariner Books imprint (couponable/VIP-discount eligible @ Kobo, price should otherwise be the same in other stores):
Marcovaldo: Or the Seasons in the City by the late Italian novelist and essayist Italo Calvino (
Wikipedia), best known for his modern classic experimental literary fiction. This is a collection of linked short stories apparently exploring the human condition via recurring seasonal themes and has its own
Wikipedia entry for more info.
A charming portrait of one man’s dreams and schemes, by “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” (The Guardian).
In this enchanting book of linked stories, Italo Calvino charts the disastrous schemes of an Italian peasant, an unskilled worker in a drab northern industrial city in the 1950s and ’60s, struggling to reconcile his old country habits with his current urban life.
Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing for the unspoiled rural world of his imagination. Much to the continuing puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams and gives rein to his fantasies, whether it’s sleeping in the great outdoors on a park bench, following a stray cat, or trying to catch wasps. Unfortunately, the results are never quite what he anticipates.
Spanning from the 1950s to the 1960s, the twenty stories in Marcovaldo are alternately comic and melancholy, farce and fantasy. Throughout, Calvino’s unassuming masterpiece “conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life” (The New York Times).
Flush by the late British modern classic author Virginia Woolf (
Wikipedia; public domain in Life+70 countries), her experimental hybrid literary novel/biography of Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, apparently depicting
life, the universe, and everything London and the life and surroundings of his owner through the dog's eyes, which also has its own
Wikipedia entry for more info.
This edition contains a 1983 introduction by Trekkie Ritchie (which is an awesome kind of name to have, if you're a science fiction fan, and probably hard to live with if you're not; ETA: apparently it was a nickname, and she was an artist and also Leonard Woolf's lover after Virginia died, according to her
Wikipedia entry and
obituary @ The Independent) and seems to have some notes in the back, according to the TOC in the preview (ETA: these were apparently part of the original text and not specially added to HMH's edition).
The story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel—by Virginia Woolf, who has “made him a real and vivid personality . . . in her most delightful style” (Kirkus Reviews).
Wanting to “ease [her] brain” after writing The Waves, Virginia Woolf turned to the correspondence between poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—and found in their love letters an unexpected inspiration in their shared joy and affection for Flush, their cocker spaniel. As she put it, “the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn’t resist making him a Life.”
Here Flush tells his story as well as the love story of Robert Browning and his wife, complete with horrid maids, bullying fellow dogs, mysterious illnesses, and clandestine romance. Along the way, plenty of other topics are explored, including the barriers between man and animal, the miseries of London, and the oppression of women by “father and tyrants.”
Imbued with Woolf’s philosophical views about the repressive Victorian mindset, Flush is a unique and imaginative story of a dog, of what it means to love—spiritually, emotionally, and unconditionally—and of what it means to human. A unique literary treat, it is “a brilliant biographical tour de force” (The New York Times) and “a canine classic” (The Guardian).