"Both Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges have contributed greatly to our understanding of the fantastic. Calvino in his book, The Uses of Literature says, "I leave the critics the task of placing my novels and short stories within or outside of some classification of Fantasy. For me, the main thing in a narrative is not the explanation of an extraordinary event, but the order of things that this extraordinary event produces in itself and around it; the patterns of symmetry, the network of images deposited around it as in the formation of a crystal." (The Uses of Literature, New York: Norton, 1979, p. 73)"