It is Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s debut book and consists of six short stories, although the author preferred the definition of an ‘episodic novel’. Each story, while constituting a unit in itself, finds its fulfilment in a unity that has ‘as its common thread the experience of young people in the 1970s between trips to Amsterdam and London, drugs, student struggles, the search for their own identity and utopias of freedom’. With regard to the readings that influenced the genesis of these texts, the writer stated:

I think it is a book that belongs to the so-called ‘emotional’ literature, which is based above all on reading Céline, the early Arbasino, Baldwin and all the harsh and violent literature: from William Burroughs to Richard Price and also one Selby, let’s say a kind of dramatic fiction that relies heavily on action, intrigue, character, so a book that can be summed up in voice and that in voice finds its own dimension of writing.

Altri libertini, published by Feltrinelli in 1980, was seized by the judicial authorities for the crime of obscenity twenty days after it appeared in bookshops, when a third edition had already been prepared. The trial was held in Mondovì (Cuneo) in 1981 and acquitted the defendant and the publisher with a full verdict.

The writer, in the last months of his life, prepared a partial revision of the text aimed at pointing out errors and modifying linguistic situations within the stories.

The French translation, with the title Les Nouveaux Libertins, was published by Seuil in 1987; the German translation, with the title Andere Freiheiten, was published by Rowohlt in 1990.