Alberto Moravia

Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother. Alberto Moravia’s classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published until 1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to captivate a twenty-first-century audience.

The class requested

The glitter and cynicism of Rome under Mussolini provide the background of what is probably Alberto Moravia’s best and best-known novel — The Woman of Rome. It’s the story of Adriana, a simple girl with no fortune but her beauty who models naked for a painter, accepts gifts from men, and could never quite identify the moment when she traded her private dream of home and children for the life of a prostitute. One of the very few novels of the twentieth century which can be ranked with the work of Dostoevsky, The Woman of Rome also tells the stories of the tortured university student Giacomo, a failed revolutionary who refuses to admit his love for Adriana; of the sinister figure of Astarita, the Secret Police officer obsessed with Adriana; and of the coarse and brutal criminal, Sonzogno, who treats Adriana as his private property. Within this story of passion and betrayal, Moravia calmly strips away the pride and arrogance hiding the corrupt heart of Italian Fascism.

Il disprezzo, known in English as Contempt or A Ghost At Noon, is an Italian existential novel by Alberto Moravia that came out in 1954. It was the basis for the 1963 film Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard.

Il disprezzo, known in English as Contempt or A Ghost At Noon, is an Italian existential novel by Alberto Moravia that came out in 1954. It was the basis for the 1963 film Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard.

The leader of the people / John Steinbeck Mr. Know-all / W. Somerset Maugham Vanka / Anton Chekhov The happy prince / Oscar Wilde The old demon / Pearl S. Buck The sailor-boy's tale / Isak Dinesen Young Archimedes / Aldous Huxley Butch minds the baby / Damon Runyon Suspicion / Dorothy L. Sayers Hautot and his son / Guy de Maupassat The open boat / Stephen Crane My Oedipus complex / Frank O'Connor The snows of Kilimanjaro / Ernest Hemingway A letter to God / Gregorio López y Fuentes The little Bouilloux girl / Colette The ruby / Corrado Alvaro Six feet of the country / Nadine Gordimer [The boarding house](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15073259W/The_Boarding_House) / James Joyce The brute / Joseph Conrad A double game / Alberto Moravia Maternity / Lilika Nakos Lead her like a pigeon / Jessamyn West God sees the truth, but waits / Leo Tolstoy The walker-through-walls / Marcel Ayme [The lottery](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3171085W/Lottery) / Shirley Jackson The McWilliamses and the burglar alarm / Mark Twain The Augsburg chalk circle / Bertolt Brecht The overcoat / Sally Benson Blind MacNair / Thomas H. Raddall The procurator of Judaea / Anatole France The open window / Saki (H.H. Munro) María Concepción / Katherine A. Porter My Lord, the baby / Rabindranath Tagore The end of the party / Graham Greene Modern children / Sholom Aleichem Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald Carrion spring / Wallace Stegner Just lather, that's all / Hernando Téllez The secret life of Walter Mitty / James Thurber The rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence The Sunday menace / Robert Benchley The Mezzotint /Montague R. James The alligators / John Updike Pelageya / Mikhail Zoshchenko Haircut / Ring Lardner The burning city / Hjalmar Söderberg Fireworks for Elspeth / Rumer Godden The old chief Mshlanga / Doris Lessing Who cares? / Santha Rama Rau Over the river and though the wood / John O'Hara Dental or mental, I say it's spinach / S.J. Perelman The drover's wife / Henry Lawson The huntsmen / Paul Horgan The guest / Albert Camus Patience / Nigel Balchin Among the paths to Eden / Truman Capote Admiral's night / Machado de Assis The bet / Anton Chekhov The man who could work miracles / H.G. Wells A country love story / Jean Stafford A worn path / Eudora Welty The outstation / W. Somerset Maugham A priest in the family / Leo Kennedy The cop and the anthem / O. Henry Marriage á la mode / Katherine Mansfield The nightingale / Maxim Gorky The launch / Max Aub The wreath / Luigi Pirandello The eighty-yard run / Irwin Shaw You were perfectly fine / Dorothy Parker Luzina takes a holiday / Gabrielle Roy

"The two women of Alberto Moravia's powerful story are mother and daughter - Cesira, a widowed Roman shopkeeper, and Rosetta, a naive teenager of haunting beauty and devout faith. When the German army prepares to occupy Rome, Cesira packs a few provisions, sews her life savings into the seams of her dress, and flees south with Rosetta to her native province of Ciociara, a poor, mountainous region famous for providing the domestic servants of Rome. For nine months the two women endure hunger, cold, and filth as they await the arrival of the Allied forces.". "But the Liberation, when it comes, brings unexpected tragedy. On their way home the pair are attacked and Rosetta brutally raped by a group of Allied Moroccan soldiers. This act of violence so embitters Rosetta that she falls numbly into a life of prostitution. In his story of two women Moravia offers up an intimate portrayal of the anguish and destruction wrought by war, as devastating behind the lines as it is on the battlefield."--BOOK JACKET.

Moravia's political fable about an Italian anti-Fascist and the frightened, suicide-seeking German girl he encounters on a boat to Capri--the setting of Moravia's Il disprezzo from 1954--was welcomed as one of his finest novels. Stephen Spender for The New York Review of Books commented: "One of the most brilliant strokes in this novel about relations in the Thirties between Italians and Germans is that Moravia never reveals whether his Italian narrator and hero is serious or not, and doubt about the seriousness lies in his being Italian.... This is the truth of the book: that within the external situation of the Italian Fascist--German Nazi relationship it is impossible to accept as authentic virtually anything people do." Moravia is not simply painting the portrait of an age but also coming to grips through his art with the great questions of all ages - the erotic, love, death, and the purposes of life. 1934 recapitulates the major themes of his art and at the same time takes us beyond them.

Racconti romani (Roman Tales) is a series of sixty-one short stories. Written and published initially in the Italian newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, they were published as a collection in 1954 by Bompiani. All of the stories are set in Rome or its surroundings after World War II and focus on 'the common people of Rome' (Roma popolana). The characters in these stories tend to be the unemployed, ex-convicts, waiters, drivers, con artists, thieves and petty criminals, the average man (or woman) and the lower classes aspiring to climb out of poverty. All the stories are told in the first person with the narrator often unnamed, although details are usually furnished to provide a clue to the narrator's identity, such as their occupation, motivations and social status. Moravia's Racconti Romani provide a snapshot on life in Rome after World War II, revealing much about the inhabitants of Rome in the early 1950s.

"Set in Rome, The Time of Indifference tells a deceptively simple story. Five characters are cast loose on the sea of modern life - obsessed with what they want, what they feel they are owed, the wrongs that have been done them, their loneliness. The intrigues of these family members and lovers serve to expose the hollow core of bourgeois society in the early twentieth century, and what Moravia destroys forever in this pitiless novel is the illusion that a world of ever-growing material comfort can ever feed the human soul."--BOOK JACKET.

Edoardo, ex-left-wing militant turned professor of French, is a voyeur of life and love. Family and other problems haunt him, and he discovers that he has been unable to see for looking. By the Italian author of "Erotic Tales", whose books were banned during the years of fascism.

Il disprezzo, known in English as Contempt or A Ghost At Noon, is an Italian existential novel by Alberto Moravia that came out in 1954. It was the basis for the 1963 film Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard.

Throughout these twenty erotic stories, peopled with a gallery of eccentric individuals, run the recurring themes of violence, sexual yearnings, frustration, boredom, and the bourgeoisie.

The ribald new masterpiece by one of the world's great novelists -- an unflinching view of private lives in Roman of mid-20th century.