Lovely.

One of my favourites, I've just finished rereading. What I like best about it - and what I'm most envious of, to be truthful - is the sheer weight of imagination in the pages. Each prose poem, each invisible city (including my own, the city of spider-webs) contains enough material to make an entire book in itself... and that book would be strange and beautiful and original.

Calvino, though, takes these tiny miraculous things and puts them all together, because when you're a genius like he is you don't have to hoard your inspiration, you can just let it spill out and over because there's always more where that came from. Wonderful, confident, trusting writing.