(Novembre 21, 2016) In 1984, Italo Calvino was invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Before his death he was able to complete five of the six planned lectures on the imaginative possibilities of language and literature. The lectures, collected as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are now available in a celebrated new translation by Geoffrey Brock. The Center for Fictions, in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Culture in New York, organized an evening with Jonathan Lethem who will present his thoughts about the first lecture in Six Memos..., 'Lightness,' and discuss the profound effect Calvino's work had on his writing practice. The event is scheduled for Sunday December 4 from 7 to 9 PM at the Brooklyn Historical Society of New York. Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among other publications. His most recent book, A Gambler's Anatomy, was published in October. (Red)

PROFILE / LITERARY WORK

Issues covered by Calvino in his "American Lessons" describe the characteristics of the literary work that, according to the author, one should take with him for the years to come: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. He illustrates his views starting from his own experience as a writer, then outline the pros and cons through excursus among the literary works, the characters and the authors that stimulated in him thoughts and reflections - not a few.