Marco Polo describes fifty-five fantastical, impossible cities to the aging emperor Kublai Khan in a series of prose poems that are as much a meditation on memory, desire, and language as on any real city.
Books mentioned in Invisible Cities (3)
New Atlantis by Francis Bacon: “The Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.”
The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella: “The Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.”
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: “Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.”
Books that mention Invisible Cities (5)
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: “a girl ... was smoking a clove cigarette and reading Invisible Cities”
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine: “A scorched copy of Calvino's Invisible Cities sits as a relic on her desk”
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom: “Calvina's Invisible Cities come in eleven groupings, scattered rather than bunched: cities and-memory, desire, signs, eyes, names, the dead, the sky”