Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges seem to me to be 'of a piece.' They are all writerly writers - now this is not so uncommon. Many writers, especially modernist and postmodernist writers, could be described as such. In and of itself, that isn't too unique. What make these three unique, in my eyes, is that they're also very readerly writers for a specific value of readerly - all three are fascinated by the act of reading itself. Borges, I would hope, doesn't need to be explained in this regard. Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is about a Reader attempting to find a novel of that same name; and Eco's The Name of the Rose revolves around the contents of a missing work by Aristotle.
(Note: of these writers, I have read Borges's Ficciones, Calvino's Invisible Cities, and I'm in the middle of reading The Name of the Rose.)
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