For Publishers Weekly, he named his ten favorite cities in literature, including:
Invisible Cities by Italo CalvinoRead about another entry on the list.
Calvino’s books were some of the first that made me want to write fiction. Much later, I mined Invisible Cities, one of his masterpieces — a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan that’s also a series of prose poems about the metaphorical potential of the city — for the epigraph to Detroit City Is the Place to Be, Detroit being a city that’s long existed as a sort of (to borrow the apt phrasing of one headline writer) “Metaphoropolis.”
Invisible Cities is one of Pat Conroy's six favorite books.
--Marshal Zeringue