About this episode

Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin discuss Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' and its connections to Marco Polo's travels, exploring themes of reality, fantasy, and truth-telling.

Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. In this free episode from their Close Readings series ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling. Listen to the full series of ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, and all our other Close Readings series, with a Close Readings subscription. Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/crtravelff Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/crtravelffweb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People in this episode

Host: Marina Warner

Guest: Anna Della Subin

Topics covered

• literature
• fantasy
• storytelling
• politics
• travel
• Calvino

Keywords

• Italo Calvino
• Invisible Cities
• Marco Polo
• fantasy
• storytelling
• anti-fascism
• Close Readings
• literature analysis

Sponsors

Close Readings

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The London Review of Books, Close Readings

Books & works: Invisible Cities, Travels of Marco Polo

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