Writer, essayist, and journalist, Italo Calvino was born in 1923 in Cuba, of Italian parents. He spent his early years in San Remo, and studied at Turin, where he worked as a publisher. His first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), described resistance against Fascism in a highly naturalistic manner. Calvino's whimsical and imaginative fables made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers in the 20th century. He died in 1985.

Before the universe began to expand, when all of everything existed in a single point in space, Qfwfq was there. And afterwards - through the millennia, across galaxies and in different, shifting forms - he persisted.

He has some stories to tell.

A collection of enchanting stories, in revised translation, about the evolution of the universe. The characters, fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures, disport themselves amongst galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and have time for a love life too.

'Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?'