Published posthumously, Under the Jaguar Sun gathers three unfinished stories in which Italo Calvino turns his extraordinary imagination toward the senses themselves.

Taste, hearing and smell become ways of thinking about the world rather than merely experiencing it. In "Under the Jaguar Sun", a journey through Mexico slowly becomes an inquiry into appetite, ritual and sacrifice; elsewhere Calvino explores music, language, monarchy and perception with the lightness and philosophical precision that made him one of the twentieth century's most distinctive writers.

Although slight in size, this is one of Calvino's strangest and most concentrated books. The stories sit somewhere between fable, essay and philosophical fiction, asking how desire shapes knowledge and how the body mediates reality. An ideal volume for readers who love Borges, Lispector or Barthes, it offers Calvino at his most playful and elusive: unfinished not in the sense of incomplete, but permanently open.

First American edition, first printing (1988, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Hardcover with unclipped dust jacket. Light shelf wear and a few faint marks to the jacket, with clean, bright pages and a solid binding.