"Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic, and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy, and also...the richest in representing social ambiances, the human comedy, the chronicle of a society. But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings." --Italo Calvino

"Cesare Pavese's cool, contemplative voice was the most important among postwar Italian writers. He created a fresh narrative vernacular not only responsive to modern urban life but also to the traces in our time of the archaic past." --W. S. DiPiero

"Pavese made an attempt heroic and successful, to encompass national and social concerns. His novels about Italy in the later stages of the Second World War formed a 'historical cycle of my own times'.....Among the [Italian neo-realist] novelists, Cesare Pavese had...the greatest mastery." --The New York Review of Books

"Now there can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century. The new translations and the introduction by R.W. Flint are admirable." --Susan Sontag

"A control of prose rhythms that makes [Pavese's] language at once absolutely lucid and completely incantatory." --Leslie Fielder

"[Flint's] translation is readable, stylish, and sometimes quite lyrical."--The New Yorker

"There is something about [Pavese]--and the translation does not lose it--that is insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive." -The New York Times Book Review

"...one of the word's great creative depressives. The Moon and the Bonfires [is] his masterpiece on the aftermath of the partisan war in the hills around Turin."- The Daily Telegraph