“Pierre Gascar . . . ranks among the most original talents of contemporary France and easily, along with Paul Morand and J. P. Sartre, among the best authors of recits and short stories since Maupassant. He has not yet received his full due in this country or in Britain, although two or three of his powerful stories of animals, in his Goncourt Prize volume Beasts and Men, are now required reading many French classes in the United States. . . . Five translators have rendered these poignant stories into vivid English. The concreteness of the imagery, the parsimony of language, the unremitting tension, and the avoidance of all rhetoric or sentimentality should fascinate and delight the readers of a genre, the long short story, today more remarkable than the novel in French literature.”– Saturday Review