Italo Calvino on The Garden of Forking Paths: “Both of these passages allude to the title of Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths and its thematics of ramified time”
Italo Calvino on Crime and Punishment: “Flannery sets out to obtain inspiration by transcribing the opening passage from a classic novel, such as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment”
Italo Calvino on Utopia: “Invisible Cities (1972) rewrites Marco Polo's travels recounted in Il milione as well as More's Utopia”
Italo Calvino on Candide: “Consisting of thirty chapters, like one of its literary models and intertexts, Voltaire's Candide, it recounts the life of the protagonist Cosima”
Italo Calvino on Clarissa: “a vast range of allusions to contemporary texts from Lesage's picaresque novel Gil Blas to Richardson's Clarissa and Fielding's Jonathan Wild.”
Italo Calvino on Gil Blas: “a vast range of allusions to contemporary texts from Lesage's picaresque novel Gil Blas to Richardson's Clarissa”
Italo Calvino on Don Quixote: “or the play within the play of Hamlet, or Don Quixote reading Don Quixote, is that if fictional characters can become readers or spectators...”
Italo Calvino on The End of the Tether: “the name is also determined by that of the protagonist of Conrad's The End of the Tether, Captain Whalley”