Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium

“Perhaps it is a sign of our millennium’s end that we frequently wonder what will happen to literature and books in the so-called postindustrial era of technology. I don’t much feel like indulging in this sort of speculation. My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.” Italo Calvino

In 1984, Italo Calvino was invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Although he died before he was able to deliver them, he wrote five of the six planned lectures on the imaginative possibilities of language and literature.

Join American architect and MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang in conversation with Oulipian author and translator Daniel Levin Becker for a discussion of Geoffrey Brock’s masterful new translation of Calvino’s lectures, collected as Six Memos for the Next Millennium.