Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
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. Marina and Anna Della 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.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: lrb.me/applecryt
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsyt
Further reading in the LRB:
Salman Rushdie: Calvino
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n17/salman-rushdie/calvino
James Butler: Infinite Artichoke
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/james-butler/infinite-artichoke
Jonathan Coe: Calvinoism
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n06/jonathan-coe/calvinoism
Next episode: The Alice books by Lewis Carroll.
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
ABOUT CLOSE READINGS
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books which looks at different periods and themes in literature through selections of key texts, covering poetry, fiction, history and philosophy from Ancient Greece to the present day.
Find more episodes here: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT6dL0t3N1uwntdebUCvXl_JD7K9J8B0K
Subscribe: lrb.me/closereadingsyt
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:
lrb.me/audiobookscip
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
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. Marina and Anna Della 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.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: lrb.me/applecryt
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsyt
Further reading in the LRB:
Salman Rushdie: Calvino
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n17/salman-rushdie/calvino
James Butler: Infinite Artichoke
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/james-butler/infinite-artichoke
Jonathan Coe: Calvinoism
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n06/jonathan-coe/calvinoism
Next episode: The Alice books by Lewis Carroll.
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
ABOUT CLOSE READINGS
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books which looks at different periods and themes in literature through selections of key texts, covering poetry, fiction, history and philosophy from Ancient Greece to the present day.
Find more episodes here: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT6dL0t3N1uwntdebUCvXl_JD7K9J8B0K
Subscribe: lrb.me/closereadingsyt
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:
lrb.me/audiobookscip
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
