Rosemary Stoyle
Ingredients Rather Than Cake on Offer
Well, how do you read the Literary Review? One review a day? As they come? Picking one anywhere, lured by the title, or the picture, or just the way the pages fall open? Numbers in the Dark is an assorted lot of short and very short texts by Italo Calvino, and it is oddly difficult to know how to set about reading it.
Paradoxically, coming up against the problem of how to read his text, we meet Calvino head-on, since the reader’s relationship with the work was one of the puzzles the author loved to play with. He tosses around the relationship between author and text, between reader and text, between literature and
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
‘Now, thirty years after the premiere of Bennett’s play, George may become Britain’s best-understood monarch, thanks to this impressive new biography.’
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-king-who-lost-america
‘Former miners often remember a world of discipline, danger and mutual loyalty. The terms in which they talk put one in mind of military veterans.’
Richard Vinen on the age of coal.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-miners-lament
*SPECIAL OCTOBER OFFER*
Subscribe or give a gift subscription to Literary Review, and we'll send you a free copy of 'A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth' by Henry Gee (@EndOfThePier).
Use the code VERYSHORT at checkout.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/veryshort/