SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM is the text to a series of lectures which became an obsession for Italo Calvino in the last year of his life. Drawing on the works of Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Falubert, Kundera, Perec and many more, he pinpoints the universal laws and indispensable literary values future generations might cherish -lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. It is an eloquent and lively 'defence' of literature - a fitting gift for the next millennium.