We spent the tail end of 2022 reading Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which is a set of Norton Lectures Calvino was preparing to give at Harvard in 1985-1986. He died before he could deliver them, and only five of the six memos were finished. The published book contains those five: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity.

The book is short. It is also incredibly dense. These are lectures about what Calvino thought literature needed to carry into the next thousand years, and they read less like a set of essays and more like an attempt to …