I'm going to nominate
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
From Wikipedia:
Quote:
The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as parables or meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience.
Short dialogues between Kublai and Polo are interspersed every five to ten cities discussing these topics. These interludes between the two characters are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly—his hometown. Polo's response: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."
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Amazon US $9.99 |
Amazon UK £4.99 |
Amazon AU $12.99 | OverDrive, Audible
Not available as an ebook in Canada! I give up. I'm sure our Canadians can come up with a copy. The Audible version is available. As Browning almost said, "Oh, to be in England now that October's there."
182 pages.