Roberto Calasso Knihy

Nevšední dílo, stavící na autorově bravurní znalosti řecké mytologie, je zároveň básnivě vypravěčským podáním mýtů i komentářem k nim, jakýmsi podobenstvím o nadvládě nutnosti a náhody nad lidskou existencí. Ve dvanácti kapitolách podle znamení zvířetníku či počtu olympských bohů nám Calasso předkládá různé, často i protichůdné varianty řeckých bájí a současně i cestu k jejich pochopení. V jediné knize se mu daří spojit talent vtipného vypravěče a básnický cit s učeností inteligentního badatele a lehkým perem esejisty.

O Kafkově díle a životě byly napsány a vydány stovky knih a tisíce studií. Všichni autoři se v nich snažili povědět něco, co ostatní neřekli, postihnout tak Kafkovu jedinečnost. Roberto Calasso, italský filozof, znalec mytologie a nakladatel, se ve své knize K. k Franzi Kafkovi postavil ne jako ten, kdo našel pravdu jeho díla, ale jako čtenář, který si při čtení srovnává svět, v němž žije, se světem, který mu předkládá kniha a její autor. Vytváří tak jedinečný obraz Kafkova světa, který tu přestává být fikcí a stává se realitou, do níž čtenář vstupuje jako jedna z Kafkových postav. V žádném jiném textu nejsme Kafkovi blíž než v Calassově knize.

'When hunting began, it was not a man who chased an animal. It was a being that chased another being. No one could say with certainty who each of them were.' Connecting Greek and Egyptian myth, the stories of poets, shamans and gods, Roberto Calasso takes us on a spellbinding voyage that traces the beginnings of our detachment from the animal world; from the landmark evolutionary moment in which humans became the hunter rather than the prey. Roaming through time and across cultures - from the Palaeolithic era to Turing's Machine - The Celestial Hunter delves into the crucible of all our stories- the source of human grief, guilt, resilience and redemption with which we have wrestled throughout history.

A splendid reimagining of key stories from the Bible, by the author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. A man named Saul is sent to search for some lost donkeys and on the way is named king of his people. The queen of a remote African realm travels for three years with her multitudinous retinue to meet the king of Jerusalem and pose him a few riddles. A man named Abraham hears a divine voice speaking words that reverberate throughout the Bible: 'Go away from your land, from your kindred and from the house of your father toward the land that I will show you'. In The Book of All Books, Roberto Calasso weaves together stories of promise and separation from one of the founding texts of Western civilisation. These tales of grace and guilt, of the chosen and the damned, cast many Biblical figures and indeed the whole book in a light as astonishing as it is disquieting. The Book of All Books is part of a larger work which began with The Ruin of Kasch (1983) and includes The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka, and The Celestial Hunter.

THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY is a book without any modern parallel. Forming an active link in a chain that reaches back through Ovid's METAMORPHOSES directly to Homer, Roberto Calasso's re-exploration of the fantastic fables and mysteries we may only think we know explodes the entire world of Greek mythology, pieces it back together, and presents it to us in a new, and astonishing, and utterly contemporary way.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.

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.

"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"--Publisher's description.

A beguiling new reimagining of one of the most ancient and mysterious origin myths of human civilization 'The Flood didn't come suddenly as a big surprise. It came at the end of a long, tormented story. Men just went on multiplying and the noise they made was ever more irksome . . . I remember days of desperation.' 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. Following Calasso's masterful retelling of ancient Greek myths in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Indic myths in Ka, this richly imaginative work delves into the crucible of our collective consciousness to reimagine the origin stories of one of the earliest human civilizations.

With Baudelaire's critical intelligence as his inspiration, the author ranges through his life and work, focusing on two painters - Ingres and Delacroix - about whom Baudelaire wrote acutely, and then turns to Degas and Manet, who followed in the tracks Baudelaire laid down in his great essay The Painter of Modern Life.

This title traces the return of pagan divinities to Western literature from their first reappearance at the beginning of the modern era to their place in the literature of our own time. It seeks to deepen our understanding of our literary tradition.