Reading, writing, translating -- Good intentions -- Characters and names -- The failure of the Italian novel -- The fates of the novel -- Questions on realism -- Answers to nine questions on the novel -- Industrial themes -- Correspondence with Angelo Guglielmi regarding 'The Challenge to the Labyrinth' -- On translation -- Letter from a 'minor' writer -- Sitting-down literature -- Art thefts (conversation with Tullio Pericoli) -- Translating a text is the true way of reading it -- Literature and power (on an essay by Alberto Asor Rosa) -- The last fires -- Gian Carlo Ferretti, bestseller Italian-style -- The written world and the unwritten world -- A book, books -- Why do you write? -- On publishing -- Notes for a book series on moral inquiry -- Plan for a journal -- A new series, Einaudi's Centopagine series -- Einaudi Biblioteca Giovani (Einaudi Young People's Library) -- The Mondadori Biblioteca Romantica -- On the fantastic -- The knights of the Grail -- Fantastic tales of the nineteenth century -- Seven flasks of tears -- The fantastic in Italian literature -- Notturno Italiano -- Science, history, anthropology -- The genealogical forest -- Cosmological models -- Montezuma and Cortés -- Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris -- Carlo Ginzburg, 'Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm' -- Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance -- Arnold van Gennep, The Rights of Passage -- Long Journey to the Center of the Brain by Renato and Rosellina Balbi -- Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson -- Giovanni Godoli, The Sun: Story of a Star -- Essay on Love by Ortega y Gasset -- The View from Afar by Claude Lévi-Strauss -- Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic -- Ancient and Modern Ideas of Fate by Giorgio de Santillana.