The Book of All Books

'Beautiful, intellectually thrilling . . . unlike anything else' Telegraph 
 
Promise and separation. Grace and guilt. The chosen and the damned. Roberto Calasso's captivating retelling of key stories from the bible evokes the dramatic world of the Old Testament and casts one of the founding texts of Western civilization in an astonishing - and disquieting - new light. 
 
The Book of All Books is the culmination of a lifetime's work and the tenth part of a series that began with The Ruin of Kasch. 
 
'Engaging . . . enlightening' Financial Times 
 
'Surprising . . . vivid' Spectator

Beautiful, intellectually thrilling, and possessed of a kind of empyrean wryness that makes it unlike anything else . . . And, thanks in part to the heroic patience and skill of translator Tim Parks, it is often straightforwardly enjoyable and funny

Engaging . . . Calasso links the tales with reflections on sacrifice, election, evil, separation and redemption - losing, enlightening and perfecting himself in the process

An attractive and approachable reworking . . . highly artful . . . seeks to link mythological thinking with the culture of modernity in Europe . . . biblical stories are often enriched by attractive details from later Jewish legends

Calasso is among those rare people who can persuade you that it is still possible to grasp almost the whole of human culture . . . his selection is cunning and his narrative gifts considerable

An intriguing and ingenious book . . . lucid and clever without being arcane or simplistic . . . each and every page has an observation, a turn of phrase or a close reading that made me think "I never thought of that" . . .

Beguiling, surprising . . . vividness and wide-ranging erudition . . . his version of the biblical story is enhanced by its frequent forays into ancient Near Eastern mythology as well as into its Indian analogues

Illuminates the drama of Goethe's 'book of all books' - the Old testament - in intriguing and provocative ways

Calasso . . . once again muses eloquently on the Bible in this 10th entry in his series dedicated to exploring ancient myths and the human search for meaning . . . Readers with any level of biblical knowledge will benefit from Calasso's far-ranging insights

Roberto Calasso (Author) Roberto Calasso was born in Florence in 1941. An author and publisher, he began working at Adelphi Edizioni from its founding in 1962 and continued as director for fifty years. The Book of All Books is the tenth part of a series that began with The Ruin of Kasch and includes the international bestseller The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony as well as Ka, K., Tiepolo Pink, La Folie Baudelaire, Ardor, The Celestial Hunter and The Unnamable Present. He died in Milan in 2021. Tim Parks (Translator) Tim Parks has previously translated works by Machiavelli, Leopardi, Moravia, Pavese, and Calvino. He is also the author of many novels and works of nonfiction, most recently In Extremis and The Hero's Way: Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna.

The Celestial Hunter

'A poetic, erudite exploration of history and myth' Financial Times 
 
An unforgettable journey through centuries and across cultures to the pivotal moment in evolution - when humans did something that no species had yet tried - when we became the hunter and no longer the prey. Informed by Greek and Egyptian myth, the stories of poets, shamans and gods, Roberto Calasso's expansive exploration of our relationship to animals and sacrifice, encourages us to reframe our understanding of our place in history, and in the world. 
 
'Calasso has created a much discussed original genre for these books ... a dense pastiche of myth, biography, criticism, philosophy, history and minutiae ... woven together by Calasso's unflagging vision' The New Yorker

Beguiling, captivating, vital ... Informed by myth, this damning exploration of man's detachment from the animal world is ninth in a staggeringly learned series

The Celestial Hunter is an "initiation through the book", speculative but capable of changing how you see things

A spellbinding modern magus . . . he writes like a poet, not a professor, in glinting, enigmatic nuggets of narrative. At a moment when atavistic kinds of peril, awe and terror seem close at hand, it feels no great stretch to share Calasso's core belief that "the gods always return"

Calasso is especially good at describing the characters of myth and legend with a novelist's omniscient authority ... leaves you feeling not out of your depth, but smarter and better read

Tiepolo Pink

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'Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe' 
 
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life creating frescoes that are among the glories of Western art, yet he remains shrouded in mystery. Who was he? And what was the significance of the dark, bizarre etchings depicting sacrifice and magic, which he created alongside his heavenly works? Roberto Calasso explores Tiepolo as the last artist of the ancien régime and at the same time the first example of the "painter of modern life" evoked by Baudelaire. He was the incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura: the art of not seeming artful. 
 
Translated by Alastair McEwen 
 
'A brilliant, eccentric, provocative . . . and thoroughly splendid celebration of a great painter' John Banville, The New Republic 
 
'Calasso is a myth-maker ... a book that treats paintings as a kind of sorcery' Peter Conrad, Observer

Calasso has written a brilliant, eccentric, provocative, annoying, and thoroughly splendid celebration of a great painter.

As one has come to expect of this polyglot and polymathic author, the range of references that inform his viewings is broad, deep and effortless

The next best thing to visiting Europe and seeing the painter's work . . . Calasso is one of the most demanding and intoxicating critics writing today.

Throughout his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, Proust repeatedly refers to colours as Tiepolo Pink or Tiepolo Red. Who exactly was the artist that he so memorable transformed into colour? 
 
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces and villas, creating frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries admired him, they failed to understand him. 
 
Few have attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of bizarre and haunting etchings, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting them as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a gypsyish company always on the go. 
 
Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

The Unnamable Present

Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. 
 
This book, the ninth part of a work in progress, is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.

Surprising, illuminating . . . one of the many pleasures of reading Calasso is to follow the bumper-car ride of his thinking, as he caroms off this and that totemic figure dotted about the intellectual fairground

The ninth in Mr. Calasso's kaleidoscopic series of investigations into the spiritual biography of the secular West . . . the two long essays in The Unnamable Present examine the effects of novel and often dangerous mythologies-democracy, nationalism, Darwinism, race theory- in 20th-century Europe . . . he handles the events of the past with the reverence of a priest, rather than the dispassion of a historian. Material facts are the tangible aspect of hidden truths

A public intellectual in the great European tradition, whose new book attempts to define the era we're currently living through

I love Roberto Calasso's writing: it's rigorous, elusive, and expansive. The Unnamable Present continues his austere, zigzagging history of the world, but the difference is that now he's examining the supermodern - and this shift would I guess be a moment for pure celebration, were his conclusions not so inescapable and so terrifying

Calasso's erudition is dazzling . . . his assertions come in short, verbless sentences, darting from historical moment to historical moment, alighting on a person, a place, a topic, before moving briskly on

This slim but wide-ranging philosophical inquiry extends the Italian author's series on the roots of modernity, with particular attention to moral relativism

Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. 
 
Yet once contrasted with the period between 1933 and 1945, when the world made a partially successful attempt at self-annihilation, the new millennium begins to take on an unprecedented form. What emerges is something illusory, ever-shifting and occasionally murderous: the unnamable present. 
 
This book, the ninth part of a work in progress, is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.

What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? 
 
In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. With his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into the most basic question: Who is K.?

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

'It will be read and re-read not as a treatise but as a story: one of the most extraordinary that has ever been written of the origins of Western self-consciousness' Simon Schama 
 
The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was the last time the gods of Olympus feasted alongside mortals. What happened in the distant ages preceding it, and in the generations that followed, form the timeless tales of ancient Greek mythology. In this masterful retelling of the myths we think we know, Roberto Calasso illuminates the deepest questions of our existence. 
 
'The kind of book one comes across only once or twice in one's lifetime' Joseph Brodsky 
 
'A perfect work like no other' Gore Vidal

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a perfect work like no other

A masterpiece ... a wonderfully fashioned work of art

Calasso has no equal in the sparkle of his storytelling and the depth of his learning

Enlivening, enthralling, essential: a classic

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a masterful retelling of the ancient myths and fables we may only think we know. From the tale of Europa and the bull to the fall of Troy, Roberto Calasso weaves his way through the entire world of Greek mythology with a captivating sense of curiosity and intrigue that casts these classical stories in a whole new light for a modern reader.

Roberto Calasso

Tim Parks

A universe of blood, violence, and magic . . . A vigorous rendering of the remote past

Stimulating . . . Calasso's style calls to mind [Italo] Calvino's dreamlike fabulism . . . and Parks's translation is beautifully rendered and gripping, maintaining Calasso's dreamlike tone . . . Calasso vividly creates a world of gods and humankind that is unfamiliar, poetic, and memorable. This slim volume packs a potent and thought-provoking punch

The 11th volume of the late Italian writer and polymath's investigation of ancient religion interprets Mesopotamian mythology to tell the story of Utnapishtim, an eternal figure who saved life on Earth from a catastrophic flood sent by vengeful and murderous gods

A long time ago, the gods grew tired of humans and decided to send a flood to destroy them. But Ea, the god of fresh underground water, didn't agree. He advised one of his devotees, Utnapishtim, to build a quadrangular boat to house humans and animals, and saved these living creatures from the Flood. 
 
Rather than punish Utnapishtim for his disobedience, Enlil, King of the gods, granted the mortal eternal life and banished him to the island of Dilmun. Thousands of years later, when Sinbad the Sailor is shipwrecked and arrives on that very same island, the two begin a conversation about courage, loss, salvation and sacrifice.

Roberto Calasso

Praise for The Tablet of Destinies

A universe of blood, violence, and magic . . . A vigorous rendering of the remote past

Stimulating . . . Calasso's style calls to mind [Italo] Calvino's dreamlike fabulism . . . and Parks's translation is beautifully rendered and gripping, maintaining Calasso's dreamlike tone . . . Calasso vividly cre ...

The 11th volume of the late Italian writer and polymath's investigation of ancient religion interprets Mesopotamian mythology to tell the story of Utnapishtim, an eternal figure who saved life on Earth from a catast ...

A universe of blood, violence, and magic . . . A vigorous rendering of the remote past

Stimulating . . . Calasso's style calls to mind [Italo] Calvino's dreamlike fabulism . . . and Parks's translation is beautifully rendered and gripping, maintaining Calasso's dreamlike tone . . . Calasso vividly cre ...

The 11th volume of the late Italian writer and polymath's investigation of ancient religion interprets Mesopotamian mythology to tell the story of Utnapishtim, an eternal figure who saved life on Earth from a catast ...

A universe of blood, violence, and magic . . . A vigorous rendering of the remote past

Stimulating . . . Calasso's style calls to mind [Italo] Calvino's dreamlike fabulism . . . and Parks's translation is beautifully rendered and gripping, maintaining Calasso's dreamlike tone . . . Calasso vividly cre ...

The 11th volume of the late Italian writer and polymath's investigation of ancient religion interprets Mesopotamian mythology to tell the story of Utnapishtim, an eternal figure who saved life on Earth from a catast ...

Books by Roberto Calasso

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