Contents

Translator’s Introduction

Preface

Why Read the Classics?

The Odysseys within The Odyssey

Xenophon’s Anabasis

Ovid and Universal Contiguity

The Sky, Man, the Elephant

Nezami’s Seven Princesses

Tirant lo Blanc

The Structure of the Orlando Furioso

Brief Anthology of Octaves from Ariosto

Gerolamo Cardano

The Book of Nature in Galileo

Cyrano on the Moon

Robinson Crusoe, Journal of Mercantile Virtues

Candide, or Concerning Narrative Rapidity

Denis Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste

Giammaria Ortes

Knowledge as Dust-cloud in Stendhal

Guide for New Readers of Stendhal’s Charterhouse

The City as Novel in Balzac

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes

Leo Tolstoy, Two Hussars

Mark Twain, The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg

Henry James, Daisy Miller

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Pavilion on the Links

Conrad’s Captains

Pasternak and the Revolution

The World is an Artichoke

Carlo Emilio Gadda, the Pasticciaccio

Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino andando’

Montale’s Cliff

Hemingway and Ourselves

Francis Ponge

Jorge Luis Borges

The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau

Pavese and Human Sacrifice

Publisher’s Note

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