Italo Calvino

Earlier this year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a 100-book required reading list for his compatriots, it provoked anxiety, rekindling memories of Soviet-era censorship. The furor underscored an important point: that literature plays a...

This weekend is the second annual LeaLA, a celebration of Spanish-language literature connected to the famed Guadalajara Book Festival....

Pixar's film in the Oscar race for best animated short, "La Luna," is the animation studio's longest theatrical short to date....

This weekend, Wesleyan University will host an array of events paying tribute to composer Alvin Lucier, who retired from the faculty in July after 40 years of teaching. Even if you aren’t familiar with Lucier’s work, you’d be challenged...

Mark Swed review the U.S. premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas' mind-bending “chants oubliés,” It was part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Ensemble's first Green Umbrella program of the season....

The Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum is revisiting its "Home Show," an ambitious and logistically complicated project in which artists are commissioned to create new works in private homes around the city, and the public is invited to drop in......

Musica Angelica production of Mozart's "Zaide" staring Valerie Vinzant reviewed by Mark Swed...

F. Kathleen Foley reviews 'The Adventures of Pinocchio' at Deaf West....

Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's " The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Donald Antrim's seamless absurdities, Italo Calvino's "The Baron in the Trees" or David Lynch's "The Straight Story," Benjamin Parzybok's debut novel, "Couch" (Small Beer Press 280 pp.,...

By Nick Owchar Like many an excellent chronicler of village life, Lauren Groff gives us early in "The Monsters of Templeton" (Voice/Hyperion: 364 pp., $24.95) an ensemble view of the citizens of Templeton, a place very closely modeled on Cooperstown, N....

With its "Da Vinci Code"-esque plot, Jon Fasman's first novel, "The Geographer's Library," blended history, suspense, far-flung locations and a complicated treasure hunt into a smart literary thriller. His latest, "The Unpossessed City," is similarly...

"Lost Paradise" by Cees Nooteboom (Grove) Nooteboom's latest novel has two protagonists. One, a young and wealthy Brazilian woman, travels to Australia, hoping to recover her life after she has been raped and left for dead in a Sao Paolo favela. There...