The Book of All Books

'Beautiful, intellectually thrilling . . . unlike anything else' Telegraph 
 
Promise and separation. Grace and guilt. The chosen and the damned. Roberto Calasso's captivating retelling of key stories from the bible evokes the dramatic world of the Old Testament and casts one of the founding texts of Western civilization in an astonishing - and disquieting - new light. 
 
The Book of All Books is the culmination of a lifetime's work and the tenth part of a series that began with The Ruin of Kasch. 
 
'Engaging . . . enlightening' Financial Times 
 
'Surprising . . . vivid' Spectator

Beautiful, intellectually thrilling, and possessed of a kind of empyrean wryness that makes it unlike anything else . . . And, thanks in part to the heroic patience and skill of translator Tim Parks, it is often straightforwardly enjoyable and funny

Engaging . . . Calasso links the tales with reflections on sacrifice, election, evil, separation and redemption - losing, enlightening and perfecting himself in the process

An attractive and approachable reworking . . . highly artful . . . seeks to link mythological thinking with the culture of modernity in Europe . . . biblical stories are often enriched by attractive details from later Jewish legends

Calasso is among those rare people who can persuade you that it is still possible to grasp almost the whole of human culture . . . his selection is cunning and his narrative gifts considerable

An intriguing and ingenious book . . . lucid and clever without being arcane or simplistic . . . each and every page has an observation, a turn of phrase or a close reading that made me think "I never thought of that" . . .

Beguiling, surprising . . . vividness and wide-ranging erudition . . . his version of the biblical story is enhanced by its frequent forays into ancient Near Eastern mythology as well as into its Indian analogues

Illuminates the drama of Goethe's 'book of all books' - the Old testament - in intriguing and provocative ways

Calasso . . . once again muses eloquently on the Bible in this 10th entry in his series dedicated to exploring ancient myths and the human search for meaning . . . Readers with any level of biblical knowledge will benefit from Calasso's far-ranging insights

Roberto Calasso (Author) Roberto Calasso was born in Florence in 1941. An author and publisher, he began working at Adelphi Edizioni from its founding in 1962 and continued as director for fifty years. The Book of All Books is the tenth part of a series that began with The Ruin of Kasch and includes the international bestseller The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony as well as Ka, K., Tiepolo Pink, La Folie Baudelaire, Ardor, The Celestial Hunter and The Unnamable Present. He died in Milan in 2021. Tim Parks (Translator) Tim Parks has previously translated works by Machiavelli, Leopardi, Moravia, Pavese, and Calvino. He is also the author of many novels and works of nonfiction, most recently In Extremis and The Hero's Way: Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna.

The Celestial Hunter

'A poetic, erudite exploration of history and myth' Financial Times 
 
An unforgettable journey through centuries and across cultures to the pivotal moment in evolution - when humans did something that no species had yet tried - when we became the hunter and no longer the prey. Informed by Greek and Egyptian myth, the stories of poets, shamans and gods, Roberto Calasso's expansive exploration of our relationship to animals and sacrifice, encourages us to reframe our understanding of our place in history, and in the world. 
 
'Calasso has created a much discussed original genre for these books ... a dense pastiche of myth, biography, criticism, philosophy, history and minutiae ... woven together by Calasso's unflagging vision' The New Yorker

Beguiling, captivating, vital ... Informed by myth, this damning exploration of man's detachment from the animal world is ninth in a staggeringly learned series

The Celestial Hunter is an "initiation through the book", speculative but capable of changing how you see things

A spellbinding modern magus . . . he writes like a poet, not a professor, in glinting, enigmatic nuggets of narrative. At a moment when atavistic kinds of peril, awe and terror seem close at hand, it feels no great stretch to share Calasso's core belief that "the gods always return"

Calasso is especially good at describing the characters of myth and legend with a novelist's omniscient authority ... leaves you feeling not out of your depth, but smarter and better read

Tiepolo Pink

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'Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe' 
 
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life creating frescoes that are among the glories of Western art, yet he remains shrouded in mystery. Who was he? And what was the significance of the dark, bizarre etchings depicting sacrifice and magic, which he created alongside his heavenly works? Roberto Calasso explores Tiepolo as the last artist of the ancien régime and at the same time the first example of the "painter of modern life" evoked by Baudelaire. He was the incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura: the art of not seeming artful. 
 
Translated by Alastair McEwen 
 
'A brilliant, eccentric, provocative . . . and thoroughly splendid celebration of a great painter' John Banville, The New Republic 
 
'Calasso is a myth-maker ... a book that treats paintings as a kind of sorcery' Peter Conrad, Observer

Calasso has written a brilliant, eccentric, provocative, annoying, and thoroughly splendid celebration of a great painter.

As one has come to expect of this polyglot and polymathic author, the range of references that inform his viewings is broad, deep and effortless

The next best thing to visiting Europe and seeing the painter's work . . . Calasso is one of the most demanding and intoxicating critics writing today.

Throughout his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, Proust repeatedly refers to colours as Tiepolo Pink or Tiepolo Red. Who exactly was the artist that he so memorable transformed into colour? 
 
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces and villas, creating frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries admired him, they failed to understand him. 
 
Few have attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of bizarre and haunting etchings, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting them as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a gypsyish company always on the go. 
 
Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

The Unnamable Present

Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. 
 
This book, the ninth part of a work in progress, is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.

Surprising, illuminating . . . one of the many pleasures of reading Calasso is to follow the bumper-car ride of his thinking, as he caroms off this and that totemic figure dotted about the intellectual fairground

The ninth in Mr. Calasso's kaleidoscopic series of investigations into the spiritual biography of the secular West . . . the two long essays in The Unnamable Present examine the effects of novel and often dangerous mythologies-democracy, nationalism, Darwinism, race theory- in 20th-century Europe . . . he handles the events of the past with the reverence of a priest, rather than the dispassion of a historian. Material facts are the tangible aspect of hidden truths

A public intellectual in the great European tradition, whose new book attempts to define the era we're currently living through

I love Roberto Calasso's writing: it's rigorous, elusive, and expansive. The Unnamable Present continues his austere, zigzagging history of the world, but the difference is that now he's examining the supermodern - and this shift would I guess be a moment for pure celebration, were his conclusions not so inescapable and so terrifying

Calasso's erudition is dazzling . . . his assertions come in short, verbless sentences, darting from historical moment to historical moment, alighting on a person, a place, a topic, before moving briskly on

This slim but wide-ranging philosophical inquiry extends the Italian author's series on the roots of modernity, with particular attention to moral relativism

Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. 
 
Yet once contrasted with the period between 1933 and 1945, when the world made a partially successful attempt at self-annihilation, the new millennium begins to take on an unprecedented form. What emerges is something illusory, ever-shifting and occasionally murderous: the unnamable present. 
 
This book, the ninth part of a work in progress, is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.

What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? 
 
In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. With his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into the most basic question: Who is K.?

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

'It will be read and re-read not as a treatise but as a story: one of the most extraordinary that has ever been written of the origins of Western self-consciousness' Simon Schama 
 
The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was the last time the gods of Olympus feasted alongside mortals. What happened in the distant ages preceding it, and in the generations that followed, form the timeless tales of ancient Greek mythology. In this masterful retelling of the myths we think we know, Roberto Calasso illuminates the deepest questions of our existence. 
 
'The kind of book one comes across only once or twice in one's lifetime' Joseph Brodsky 
 
'A perfect work like no other' Gore Vidal

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a perfect work like no other

A masterpiece ... a wonderfully fashioned work of art

Calasso has no equal in the sparkle of his storytelling and the depth of his learning

Enlivening, enthralling, essential: a classic

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a masterful retelling of the ancient myths and fables we may only think we know. From the tale of Europa and the bull to the fall of Troy, Roberto Calasso weaves his way through the entire world of Greek mythology with a captivating sense of curiosity and intrigue that casts these classical stories in a whole new light for a modern reader.

'To read Ka is to experience a giddy invasion of stories - brilliant, enigmatic, troubling, outrageous, erotic, beautiful' The New York Times 
 
'Who?' - or 'ka' - is the question that runs through Roberto Calasso's retelling of the stories of the minds and gods of India; the primordial question that continues to haunt human existence. From the Rigveda to the Upanishads, the Mahabharata to the life of Buddha, this book delves into the corpus of classical Sanskrit literature to re-imagine the ancient Indian myths and how they resonate through space and time. 
 
'The very best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written' Wendy Doniger 
 
'Dazzling, complex, utterly original ... Ka is his masterpiece' Sunday Times

If you want a dazzling, complex, erotic and utterly original European novel of ideas, Calasso is your man, and Ka his masterpiece

To read Ka is to experience a giddy invasion of stories - brilliant, enigmatic, troubling, outrageous, erotic, beautiful ... these stories are superbly narrated

Passage[s] of such ecstatic insight and cross-cultural synthesis-simply, of such beauty

The very best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written ... A magnificent reading of Hindu texts. Its power arises in part through strong, vivid writing and in part through stunning, unexpected metaphors

Magnificent ... A moving, exhilarating, extraordinary book ... An astonishing synthesis of myths and legends, philosophical inquiry, and speculative narrative

A scintillatingly challenging book ... Its opening sentences are as startling as any in all of literature

All is spectacle and delight, and tiny mirrors reflecting human foibles are set into the weave, turning this retelling into the stuff of literature ... Calasso's erudition and his capacity for invention appear to be limitless

In Ka, Roberto Calasso delves into the corpus of classical Sanskrit literature recreating and re-imagining the enchanting world of ancient India. Beginning with the Rig-Veda, Ka weaves together myths from the Upanishad, the Mahabharata and the stories of the Buddha, all of which pose questions that have haunted us for millennia.

The Ruin of Kasch

A sparkling new translation of the classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art 
 
The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects: "the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the ancien régime and all that came after, and was able to adapt the notion of "legitimacy" to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the centre stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient and modern regimes. 
 
'Startling, puzzling, profound . . . a work charged with intelligence and literary seduction' The New York Times 
 
'Unique, idiosyncratic and vaultingly ambitious... essential reading' Independent 
 
'A great fat jewel-box of a book, gleaming with obscure treasures' John Banville

Roberto Calasso was born in Florence in 1941. An author and publisher, he began working at Adelphi Edizioni from its founding in 1962 and continued as director for fifty years. The Book of All Books is the tenth part of a series that began with The Ruin of Kasch and includes the international bestseller The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony as well as Ka, K., Tiepolo Pink, La Folie Baudelaire, Ardor, The Celestial Hunter and The Unnamable Present. He died in Milan in 2021.

Ardor

In this revelatory volume, Roberto Calasso, whom the Paris Review has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: they left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. Only a 'Parthenon of words' remains: verses and formulations suggesting a daring understanding of life. 
 
'If the Vedic people had been asked why they did not build cities,' writes Calasso, 'they could have replied: we did not seek power, but rapture.' This is the ardor of the Vedic world, a burning intensity that is always present, both in the mind and in the cosmos. With his signature erudition and profound sense of the past, Calasso explores the enigmatic web of ritual and myth that define the Vedas. Often at odds with modern thought, he shows how these texts illuminate the nature of consciousness more than neuroscientists have been able to offer us up to now.

In this revelatory volume, Roberto Calasso, whom the Paris Review has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: they left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. Only a 'Parthenon of words' remains: verses and formulations suggesting a daring understanding of life.

The Art of the Publisher

'All the books published by a certain publisher could be seen as links in a single chain' 
 
In this fascinating memoir and manifesto the author and publisher Roberto Calasso meditates on the art of book publishing. With his signature erudition and polemical flair, Calasso transcends Adelphi to look at the publishing industry as a whole, from the essential importance of graphics, jackets and cover flaps to the consequences of universal digitization. And he outlines what he describes as the 'most hazardous and ambitious' profile of what a publishing house can be: a book comprising many books, akin to that of other twentieth-century publishers, from Giulio Einaudi to Roger Straus, of whom the book offers brief portraits.

Written with passion, intelligence and not without a certain flair for a story, it's a treat for any bibliophile, a manifesto/memoir that proves he's a master of the art form he's arguing for

What makes this slim text memorable is [Calasso's] sheer passion for books - not digital texts but physical objects, in which every part is designed to enhance the experience of reading. An important and timely book

La Folie Baudelaire

Roberto Calasso is one of the most original and acclaimed of writers on literature, art, culture and mythology. In Baudelaire's Folly, Calasso turns his attention to the poets and writers of Paris in the nineteenth century who created what was later called 'the Modern.' His protagonist is Charles Baudelaire: poet of nerves, art lover, pioneering critic, man about Paris, whose groundbreaking works on modern culture described the ephemeral, fleeting nature of life in the metropolis - and the artist's role in capturing this - as no other writer had done. 
 
With Baudelaire's critical intelligence as his inspiration, Calasso ranges through his life and work, focusing on two painters - Ingres and Delacroix - about whom Baudelaire wrote acutely, and then turns to Degas and Manet, who followed in the tracks Baudelaire laid down in his great essay The Painter of Modern Life. In a mosaic of stories, insights, dreams, close readings of poems and commentaries on paintings, Paris in Baudelaire's years comes to life. In the eighteenth century, a 'folie' was a garden pavilion set aside for people of leisure, a place of delight and fantasy. Here Calasso has created a brilliant and dramatic 'Folie Baudelaire': a place where the reader can encounter Baudelaire, his peers, his city, his extraordinary likes and dislikes, and his world, finally discovering that it is nothing less than the land of 'absolute literature'. 
 
Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of Tiepolo Pink, The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, winner of the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, Literature and the Gods, Ka and K.

Roberto Calasso [is] the most inquisitively suggestive literary critic in the world today . . .

What a rare and special book this is, from its opening paragraph . . . But then what a rare writer is the prolific, post-Calvino Italian master Roberto Calasso-72-year-old scholar, translator, author of film scripts, radio and television adaptations, operatic librettos and seemingly most other viable prose forms in the late 20th and early 21st centuries . . . [La Folie Baudelaire is] an ideal introduction in English to one of the most urbane and readable of living masters.

Arresting observations on painters and paintings alike, aided and abetted by some discriminatingly chosen illustrations, beautifully reproduced . . . La Folie Baudelaire is bedazzling.

It is a gorgeous, willful, and convincing re-staging of Baudelaire's style . . .

Smoothing the way is the curiously conversational tone in which even the most arcane information is conveyed, as well as the underlying sense that, as the author piles detail upon detail, he's having a huge amount of fun. Calasso may identify with his hero, but there is no Baudelairean melancholy in his work. There's no show-off either-only a sincere delight, an innocent reveling in his own encyclopedic mind at play. This mood is catching, and if one adopts the right dreamy pace, one can commune with Calasso through a kind of imaginative osmosis.

[Roberto Calasso is] an ambitious artist-critic, pushing the subject as far as he can, bent on penetrating the mind of both Baudelaire and his time. In the process, he delivers plenty of insight. . . Tough but rewarding, written with bold intelligence and panache.

[Roberto Calasso is] a writer about the foundational myths and tales of human society who has no equal in the sparkle of his storytelling and the depth of his learning . . .  His writing  . . . these lost voices speak again, in magical, uncanny and something even sinister ways . . .

The Forty-Nine Steps

A unique and fascinating exploration of the essential thinkers of our time - by the author of the bestselling The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

Roberto Calasso was born in Florence, Italy, and now lives in Milan, where he is the publisher of Adelphi Edizioni.  He is the author of L'impuro folle, about the famous Schreber case, and of a work in progress, of which three parts have appeared: The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka.  His most recent book is Literature and the Gods. John Shepley is a freelance writer and translator.  His translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Roman Night and Other Stories won the first Italo Calvino Translation Ward in 1987.

In books lauded as brilliant, exhilarating and profound, Roberto Calasso has revealed the unexpected intersections of ancient and modern through topics ranging from Greek and Indian mythology to what a legendary African kingdom can tell us about the French Revolution.  In this first translation of his most important essays, Calasso brings his powerful intellect and elegant prose style to bear on the essential thinkers of our time, providing a sweeping analysis of the current state of Western culture.'Forty-nine steps' refers to the Talmudic doctrine that there are forty-nine steps to meaning in every passage of the Torah.  Employing this interpretative approach, Calasso offers a 'secret history' of European literature and philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud.  Calasso analyses how figures ranging from Gustav Flaubert, Gottfried Benn, Karl Kraus and Martin Heidegger to Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno have contributed to, or been emblematic of, the current state of Western thought.  This book's theme, writ large, is the power of the fable - specifically, its persistence in art and literature despite its exclusion from orthodox philosophy. In its breadth and the nature of its concerns, The Forty-nine Steps is a philosophical and literary twin to the widely praised Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.  Combining erudition with engaging prose and original insights, Calasso contributes a daring new interpretation of some of the most challenging writers of the past 150 years.

A delightful account of the life and work of Giambattista Tiepolo.

Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which was the winner of the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, Literature and the Gods, Ka and K. 
 
Alastair McEwan has translated more than seventy books of fiction and non-fiction, including works by some of Italy's best-known writers: Baricco, Calasso, Eco, Tabucchi, and many more. He also writes occasional articles in both Italian and English for major newspapers.

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him. 
 
Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting these etchings as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, female satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, including Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a motley, gypsyish company always on the go. 
 
Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka: an utterly original, fascinating interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka that is simultaneously an unprecedented exploration into the mystery of Kafka himself.

A product of great love and deep immersion

Finely expressed, thoughtful readings... what strikes one most is their justice and tact

Offers exceptional insights: Calasso's reading of Kafka's diaries is inspired

An elegant writer, Calasso is particularly attuned to the strong erotic undercurrents in Kafka's writing and is suitably wary of finding any overarching philosophy.

K, by Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso...maintains a deft balance between genres, mixing an elegant discussion of Kafka's work with a novelist's eye for detail

Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which was the winner of the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, Literature and the Gods, Ka and, most recently, Tiepolo Pink.

What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? 
 
In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. With his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into the most basic question: Who is K.? 
 
The culmination of the author's lifelong fascination with Kafka, K. is a book of significant literary importance, the fourth part in a work in progress of which the previous volumes are The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and Ka.

Roberto Calasso

Tim Parks

A universe of blood, violence, and magic . . . A vigorous rendering of the remote past

Stimulating . . . Calasso's style calls to mind [Italo] Calvino's dreamlike fabulism . . . and Parks's translation is beautifully rendered and gripping, maintaining Calasso's dreamlike tone . . . Calasso vividly creates a world of gods and humankind that is unfamiliar, poetic, and memorable. This slim volume packs a potent and thought-provoking punch

The 11th volume of the late Italian writer and polymath's investigation of ancient religion interprets Mesopotamian mythology to tell the story of Utnapishtim, an eternal figure who saved life on Earth from a catastrophic flood sent by vengeful and murderous gods

A long time ago, the gods grew tired of humans and decided to send a flood to destroy them. But Ea, the god of fresh underground water, didn't agree. He advised one of his devotees, Utnapishtim, to build a quadrangular boat to house humans and animals, and saved these living creatures from the Flood. 
 
Rather than punish Utnapishtim for his disobedience, Enlil, King of the gods, granted the mortal eternal life and banished him to the island of Dilmun. Thousands of years later, when Sinbad the Sailor is shipwrecked and arrives on that very same island, the two begin a conversation about courage, loss, salvation and sacrifice.

The Tablet of Destinies

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Praise for The Tablet of Destinies

A universe of blood, violence, and magic . . . A vigorous rendering of the remote past

Stimulating . . . Calasso's style calls to mind [Italo] Calvino's dreamlike fabulism . . . and Parks's translation is beautifully rendered and gripping, maintaining Calasso's dreamlike tone . . . Calasso vividly cre ...

The 11th volume of the late Italian writer and polymath's investigation of ancient religion interprets Mesopotamian mythology to tell the story of Utnapishtim, an eternal figure who saved life on Earth from a catast ...

A universe of blood, violence, and magic . . . A vigorous rendering of the remote past

Stimulating . . . Calasso's style calls to mind [Italo] Calvino's dreamlike fabulism . . . and Parks's translation is beautifully rendered and gripping, maintaining Calasso's dreamlike tone . . . Calasso vividly cre ...

The 11th volume of the late Italian writer and polymath's investigation of ancient religion interprets Mesopotamian mythology to tell the story of Utnapishtim, an eternal figure who saved life on Earth from a catast ...

A universe of blood, violence, and magic . . . A vigorous rendering of the remote past

Stimulating . . . Calasso's style calls to mind [Italo] Calvino's dreamlike fabulism . . . and Parks's translation is beautifully rendered and gripping, maintaining Calasso's dreamlike tone . . . Calasso vividly cre ...

The 11th volume of the late Italian writer and polymath's investigation of ancient religion interprets Mesopotamian mythology to tell the story of Utnapishtim, an eternal figure who saved life on Earth from a catast ...

Books by Roberto Calasso

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