A novel of a delightful eccentric on a search for truth, by the renowned author of Invisible Cities. In The New York Times Book Review, the poet Seamus Heaney praised Mr. Palomar as a series of “beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination.” Throughout these twenty-seven intricately structured chapters, the musings of the crusty Mr. Palomar consistently render the world sublime and ridiculous. Like the telescope for which he is named, Mr. Palomar is a natural observer. “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,” he believes, “that you can venture to seek what is underneath.” Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, or a topless sunbather, he tends to let his meditations stray from the present moment to the great beyond. And though he may fail as an objective spectator, he is the best of company. “Each brief chapter reads like an exploded haiku,” wrote Time Out. A play on a world fragmented by our individual perceptions, this inventive and irresistible novel encapsulates the life’s work of an artist of the highest order, “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” (The Guardian).

The Author in Criticism:Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom explores the cultural and historic patterns and differences in the critical readings of Italian author Italo Calvino’s works in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Italy. It considers the external factors that contribute to create recognizable patterns in the readings of Calvino’s texts in different contexts. This volume therefore covers, most notably, matters of genre (science fiction, postmodernism), cultural perceptions and conventions, the (re)current image of the author in different media, academic schools, -curricula and -canons, biographical information (such as gender and background), and translation and the language in which the author speaks (or fails to speak) to us. It traces the influence of these aspects in the academic discourse on Calvino. The Author in Criticism also analyzes Calvino’s various professional roles as writer, editor, essayist, journalist, private correspondent, and public, cosmopolitan intellectual, reappraising their often little acknowledged importance for academic criticism. An important underlying idea is that the preconceived image that every critic has of Calvino before even opening one of his books is often solidified and repeated even in the most refined and complex critical analyses. This volume purposefully foregrounds the textual and non-textual parts that are usually considered peripheral to the works of an author, such as book covers, blurbs, reviews, talks, interviews, etc. In this way, this book provides insight into the reception of Calvino’s works in different countries. Moreover, it forms a broader reflection of and on important constants in the workings of literary criticism, and on the way academic discourses have developed in various cultural contexts over the last decades.

Italo Calvino's last fictional work is a witty, elegant, fantastic rendering of the ultimate observer, whose name, Mr. Palomar, deliberately evokes the famous telescope. "Beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination" (The New York Times Book Review). Calvino is the acclaimed author of Difficult Loves and Invisible Cities.

This book presents a baker's dozen of interpretative keys to Levi's output and thought. It deepens our understanding of common themes in Levi studies (memory and witness) while exploring unusual and revealing byways (Levi and Calvino, or Levi and theater, for example).

This thesis examines the general task of active sensing by defining a measure of efficiency for sensing in a particular environment. We focus on fine-scale acoustic mapping from an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The constraints on imaging underwater - vehicle power, vehicle hydrodynamics, computational and telemetry requirements, and typical navigational and attitudinal uncertainties along with the underlying physics of the acoustic sensing modality- are considered in defining an entropic measure of sensor efficiency. 675-kHz pencil-beam sonar data acquired using the JASON remotely operated vehicle in a challenging shallow water environment and 200-kHz echo-sounder data acquired using the ABE A UV are used to demonstrate the utility of the en tropic framework. We show the utility of an entropic framework for the following: (i) Optimizing the speed of the AUV for maximizing the information gathered with a particular sensor. (ii) the rate of convergence and the stability of our mapping efforts in the face of typical uncertainties in navigation and attitude; (iii) as a methodology for actual sensor deployment and use on a real vehicle; and (iv) in tasks such as post-mission analysis for applications such as change detection and path planning for subsequent missions.

He wasn’t looking for love or soul mates. He was looking for that Halloween high. Such was his justification. What comes around goes around was more like it. When Eunice Saint Jacques meets Adrien Ascott at the Halloween party of one of New Orleans’s prestigious hotels, she thinks he’s cute. Nah, she thinks he’s the most gorgeous creature ever. Little does she know he isn’t all that he seems to be, and that this Halloween will seal her destiny forever. While it’s Presentation Night at Club Sortilege, the renowned New Orleans BDSM club, Yvette Carlisle, the Grand Master’s slave, is worried. What happened to her friend Eunice should never have happened. Not now. Hell, not for a long time. Yet, here she is, talking to Adrien and uncovering an age-old curse that dates back to 1890 and makes his karma as deadly as that of Count Dracula himself. Is it true, or is he spinning just another tale of bondage and sadism in the plush lounge of Club Sortilege?

Twenty witty and provocative essays touching on topics ranging from Selena to Frida Kahlo to Carlos Fuentes.