Command, and I Will Obey You

The publication of Alberto Moravia's latest collection of short stories is new and further proof that the range of his talent is perhaps without parallel in the literary world today. Novels, short stories, plays, literary essays, and political reportage flow from him in an unflagging stream.

The stories here collected, twenty-seven in number, are all first-person narratives; twenty-six of them have a human narrator, and the twenty-seventh—one of the most astonishing of all—is told by a dog. These stories join the deservedly famous Roman Tales and other collections of Moravia short stories, but they serve to point out that Moravia never repeats himself. His is a talent which continues to change and grow. The clarity, the famous ironhard prose—which never tricks and strains for poetic effects—is here. But in addition to these qualities, there is a new and deeper sense of the phenomenal world around us. Moravia's scrutiny of things, time and again in these stories, reveals a world new to us, but one which we accept after Moravia's surprising genius has revealed it to us.

For critical comments concerning Moravia's latest work of non-fiction, see the back of this jacket.