SECRECY AND SILENCE are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years. But then he is assigned to kill his former professor, now in exile, to demonstrate his loyalty to the Fascist state, and falls in love with a strange, compelling woman; his life is torn open - and with it the corrupt heart of Fascism. Moravia equates the rise of Italian Fascism with the psychological needs of his protagonist for whom conformity becomes an obsession in a life that has included parental neglect, an oddly self-conscious desire to engage in cruel acts, and a type of male beauty which, to Clerici's great distress, other men find attractive. "Moravia brings to light the devil in the flesh and in the psyche." -- The Atlantic Monthly

Obsessive and confessional, sifting over every action and thought, Contempt is a tale about the precarious nature of love and integrity; a study of the limits of our subjective nature and of storytelling itself. It was adapted for the screen by Jean-Luc Godard in 1963.

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 "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 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.

An artists falls in love with his young model.

An unhappy love, marriage of convenience... and Gemma, the central character in The Wayward Wife , is drawn into an inenvitable affair before she realizes where her true feelings lie. Unsentimental, clear-sighted, dispassionately observant, this collection represent Moravia at his best.