- If on a winter’s night a traveler (Italian: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore) is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book they are reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader (“you”) finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones. The book was published in an English translation by William Weaver in 1981.
- Freeland — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
In the first days of the first year of the twentieth century, three men, all socialists, formed the Free Land Association, and one year later, on the southern shore of Holmes Harbor on Whidbey Island, the utopian community of Freeland came into being. Hoping to avoid the doctrinal disputes and human failings that had doomed other such experiments, the association’s plan for Freeland was to value cooperative living over political dogma. Other settlers in the area were self-described “capitalists,” believers in free enterprise who wanted nothing to do with socialism. Despite considerable tension and deep distrust, this mismatched group of tough, industrious, determined men and women managed to coexist, if not in harmony, at least without violence…