The Watcher and Other Stories (Harbrace Paperbound Library)

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Calvino's third tale, “The Ar gentine Ant,” is the earliest of the group, and it is more ex plicitly allegorical and more pessimistic.

The Chalke History Festival announces a new name, new look, and tons for history buffs to get their teeth into! Of the three, Calvino is the funniest, the most variously and benignly curious about the human truth as it comes embedded in its animal, vegetable, historical, and cosmic contest. He spoke about how this titular short story was the perfect depiction of representative democracy and told us all we need to know about how it functions.In Il Barone Rampante (Baron in the Trees, 1957), a boy takes to the trees to avoid eating snail soup and lives an entire, fulfilled life without ever coming back down.

Italo Calvino, author of “t zero” and “Cosmicomics,” that wonderful series of etiological fantasies whose theme is the power of the imagination over the universe, should—with this collection of three earlier tales —begin to establish himself in the minds of American readers. And in "The Argentine Ant," the citizens of a provincial seaside town struggle against a government-controlled infestation. Bumped corners and the usual signs of circulation, adhesive and paper remnants to front pastedown and rear endpapers, stamps to title page, TOC and a few other pages with a couple blackouts.In "Smog" a city dweller experiences the solid celebration of industrial power in an increasingly dangerous cloud of soot. The first two are simply dark and a bit depressing, more in the vein of his "Path to the Spiders' Nests," while the third is just tragicomic. Two of the watchers were women: one, wearing a little orange sweater, seemed a factory worker or a clerk, about thirty, with a red, freckled face; the other was fiftyish, with a white blouse, a large locket with a portrait hanging over her bosom, perhaps a widow, an elementary school-teacher, to judge by her appearance. But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose.

Front board has a 3/8 inch abrasion and a 1/8 inch light stain on edge of top board--both visible in last photo.The Watcher is the weakest of the three stories in my opinion, featuring a rambling and disjointed narrative that never gains any momentum.