Today would have been Italo Calvino's 89th birthday and in celebration of that, Israeli children's book author and illustrator Shulamit Serafy released a beautiful short animated film of one of Calvino's short stories, "The Distance From the Moon." This story is the first in the collection Cosmicomics -- one of my favorites to read and to teach. Here Calvino's fertile imagination combines math and myth, science and the fantastic, and the luminous mysteries of the universe with the evolution of daily domestic tasks. It is really an achievement. I have always loved this story -- poignant, poetic, and wonderfully translated into film.
And when you're done -- check out the article at Brain Pickings on Calvino's "14 Definitions of What Makes a Classic." This is one of my favorites and describes perfectly "The Distance From the Moon."
"10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans."
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
