“In the beginning, the mountains had great wings.” So begins Italian publisher and writer Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, a book that would become the first installment in an ambitious lifelong project meant to “unlock the mystical potential of literature,” in the words of Francesco Pacifico in the New Left Review. Calasso did this by reaching into the myths of our deep past and making them speak to us again, in what amounts to a kind of literary seance. These genre-bending works combined elements of fiction, history, biography, cultural analysis, and poetry into a rich collage of the fundamental symbols of human culture.
