The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

Before the universe began to expand, when all of everything existed in a single point in space, Qfwfq was there. And afterwards - through the millennia, across galaxies and in different, shifting forms - he persisted. He has some stories to tell. This is a collection of enchanting stories, in revised translation, about the evolution of the universe. The characters, fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures, disport themselves amongst galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and have time for a love life too. 'Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?'.

'If you have never read Cosmicomics, you have before you ... the most joyful reading experiences of your life' - Salman Rushdie 'Entirely unlike anything that anyone else has written ... In Cosmicomics Calvino makes it possible for the reader to inhabit a meson, a mollusc, a dinosaur; makes him for the first time see light ending a dark universe ... During the last [part of the twentieth] century Italo Calvino ... advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere' - Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books