Listen to our conversation with Merve Emre on YouTube: youtu.be/2yUqFIMOeTY This month on the Deerfield Public Library Podcast, I am very pleased to share a conversation with acclaimed critic Merve Emre on the beloved Italian writer Italo Calvino, known for his genre-defying stories and novels like Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler. Merve Emre is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, associate professor of English at Oxford University, and currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University. In a recent essay in The New Yorker, Merve Emre calls Calvino, “word for word, the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century.” It is an enthusiasm we both share. Indeed, we learn that for both of us, reading Calvino novels set us on a path of making a career out of talking to people about books. Emre’s essay on Calvino was occasioned by the new publication in English of a book of his essays, The Written World and the Unwri...