Erotic Tales by Alberto Moravia, the outstanding author of the chef d’oeuvre Contempt aka Disprezzo, translated as Ghost at Noon, which sits at 48 on Le Monde’s Top 100 books of The Century, it is also one of the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, The Greatest Books of All Time’s algorithm has it lower than I even deign to put here…nevertheless, it is one of my Top 100 Favorites – you have thousands of reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other sites on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel, where my macaws are of more interest

 

Erotic Tales by Alberto Moravia, the outstanding author of the chef d’oeuvre Contempt aka Disprezzo, translated as Ghost at Noon, which sits at 48 on Le Monde’s Top 100 books of The Century, it is also one of the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, The Greatest Books of All Time’s  algorithm has it lower than I even deign to put here…nevertheless, it is one of my Top 100 Favorites – you have thousands of reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other sites on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel, where my macaws are of more interest

 

8 out of 10

 

Contempt https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/contempt-by-alberto-moravia.html is a magnum opus, and if we are to compare that with Erotic Tales, then the latter would be dismissed, indeed, it is conceivably wrong to come to it with too high expectations, because one would be disappointed, and then there is

 

Daniel Kahneman, the marvelous Nobel Prize Winner, the only psychologist to have won it, for Economics though, there is no such prize for psychology: he explained Regression to the mean: ‘This phenomenon occurs due to natural variation or chance. For instance, if a student scores exceptionally high or low on a test due to luck, their score is likely to be closer to the average on a retest’ or else, rara avis does not come to sight often

Thinking Fast and Slow is a classic of psychology, and you have this passage in there, along with so much more https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/06/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel.html - Erotic Tales are entertaining, if not on the level of Contempt or Time of Indifference, another masterpiece of Alberto Moravia

 

It is interesting, if perhaps counterintuitive for me, to find quite a few erotic books rated very highly, included among the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, on The Greatest Books of All Time and other lists – take Anais Nin and her Erotic Tales, which are even more explicit than Alberto Moravia’s https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/11/erotica-delta-of-venus-and-more-by.html I wish I had them as a teenager

Indeed, some of the stories included in this compilation do not even have a sexual connotation, like the one called There’s a Neutron Bomb for Ants Too, in which the narrator is upset because ants eat his honey (or was it jam) and then he sets a newspaper on fire and burns many of them, wondering if they suffer, scream…

 

The spouse tells him about the chemical solution, but then we have The Voyeur’s Stroll – apparently, there is another book called The Voyeur, close to 200 pages long, by Moravia – wherein we have this personage who watches (the definition of the voyeur) a naked couple, as they come back from taking a swim

Then there is The Hands Around The Neck, the woman wants her spouse to…put his hands around her neck, which reminds me of The Story of O https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-story-of-o-by-pauline-reage-is.html 807th on The Greatest Books of All Time site, this book is really about BDSM, and I wonder…

Would it be published today? On the other hand, it is written by a woman, Pauline Reage, and that means we do not have the fantasies of a man, beating, harassing, hurting his partner, who becomes a sort of slave, except she enjoys this with ardor, she has climaxes with these abusers, and then is that pain…’pain is so close to pleasure’