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Before time began—so science tells us—all points in space were compacted together into a single point of infinite density. Only Italo Calvino would have thought to imagine that point as a crowded, stifling-hot apartment building, where the people grow snappish from being “packed in there like sardines,” literally in each other’s faces. collects (for the first time in North America) all the stories in Calvino’s Cosmicomics series, which anthropomorphizes science with the aplomb of a master fabulist. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)