In the five stories included in this collection - "The Wall," "The Room," "Erostratus," "Intimacy" and "The Childhood of a Leader"--The French master of Existentialism displays his powers of narrative and psychological insight in the stories of a modern Erostratus who is compelled to murder, a psychotic who communicates his hallucinations to his formerly-sane spouse, an unfaithful wife still bound to her impotent husband, a boy's metamorphosis into an anti-semitic fascist, and the astonishing fate of a political prisoner.