Ten New Italo Calvinos
(New Italo Calvinos, I mean, in the same way that singer-songwriters were once billed as “new Bob Dylans.” I consider the description an honorific. There are few other lists on this site on which I myself would so much like to appear. (Maybe this one.) The judgements I’m making here are mostly instinctual, but if there are any qualities that all these writers seem to share with Calvino, it’s their lightness of touch, combined with a taste for formal experimentation, metafiction, and fable. I’ve arranged the writers in something like their birth order, adding what I consider to be their most Calvinoesque title in parentheses.)
Giorgio Manganelli (Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels)
Steven Millhauser (Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright)
César Aira (The Musical Brain & Other Stories)
Éric Chevillard (The Crab Nebula)
Susanna Clarke (Piranesi)
Vikram Paralkar (The Afflictions)
Ryan O’Neill (Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers)
Karen Russell (Vampires in the Lemon Grove)
Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems)
Olga Ravn (The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century)
— January 10, 2022