Romanzi e racconti. I racconti

In 1958, at Einaudi's solicitation, Calvino began work on the volume of Short Stories with the intention of giving coherence to his itinerary in the short forms. The first core of short stories, Difficult Idylls, is the thickest and most heterogeneous of the four that would make up the final structure of the collection, with the stories set among the woods and the sea of San Remo, populated "by underwater fishermen and infallible hunters or "schiappini", the realm of boys, fish, crabs, reptiles and birds," as stated in the flap of the first edition's dust jacket. After Difficult Memoirs and Difficult Loves, republished later as a stand-alone collection, the volume closes with Difficult Life, which collects the civil trilogy formed by The Argentine Ant, Plunge into Real Estate and Smog cloud. A Novellino to contemporary Italy, as Calvino himself called it, the volume brings together a deeply thoughtful anthological selection of the vast output of a writer who has favored short forms since his early days.