Italo Calvino, Italy's most important postwar novelist, was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The letters included in this selection are filled with insights about Calvino's writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics.