Calvino's refusal to be glum set him apart from other modernists. His marvellous Fifties trilogy, Our Ancestors, brought us allegorical fables about a cloven viscount, a non-existent knight and a baron who swings from the trees

Calvino's genius lies not so much in this tantalising conceit, but the brilliance and ingenuity with which he pulls it off...A dazzling display of literary fireworks

The writing is just breathtaking and the final story, 'The Non-Existent Knight', still sends a shiver up my spine

Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries, as they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place but learnt how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends

One of the greatest tale-spinners of modern times

He will continue to glitter, this strange, lonely prospector in the universe of words, well into the next millennium and after, a master in the empire of the imagination

A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction

Rose Tremain is a prolific and much lauded writer but here she is at her best

Painful moments of self-revelation are expertly drawn

Striking collection of stories

As you would expect, the stories in this collection involve a certain amount of cultural tourism to the lower depths, undertaken with black humour... Welsh's relish for degradation covers up a strong sentimental streak

Welsh's transcription of Scots dialect is brilliant... Welsh also has a fabulous sense of the absurd... The overall vibe of these stories is dark and grim. And fierily, fiercely funny