If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, published in 1979. It appeared in an English translation by William Weaver in 1981.

The book takes the form of a frame story about a reader who is trying to read a novel of the same title. Each chapter except the last is divided into two sections, and the first section is written in the second person, describing what the reader does in order to obtain and read the next part.

The second half of each chapter is the opening of a completely different book, usually with a very different plot and style from the one before it. That is how the novel keeps the reader inside the act of reading rather than inside a single story. and each opening is left unfinished.

It begins with a chapter on the art and nature of reading, and it is divided into twenty-two passages in all, with the odd-numbered ones and the final passage narrated in the second person.