CHRISTMAS TALES OF FLANDERS, illustrated by _Jean de Bosschere_ (Dodd,
Mead & Co.). If you like Andersen's Fairy Tales, here is a book which
comes as truly from the heart of a people. Many old folk legends are
here set down just as they came from the lips of old people in Flanders,
and as they have never grown old in that countryside let us hope that
they will take root equally well here. The volume is superbly
illustrated with many pictures from the whimsical fancy of Jean de
Bosschere. These pictures are indescribable, but they will rejoice the
heart of any child, old or young.
FROM DEATH TO LIFE by _A. Apukhtin_, translated by _R. Frank_ and _E.
Huybers_ (R. Frank). This story, which so happily inaugurates a series
of translations from Russian literature, is a poetic study in life after
death, chronicling the experiences of a soul between death and rebirth.
The translators have succeeded in reflecting successfully the fine
imaginative style of this prose poem, which deserves to be widely known.
It tempts us to wish that other stories by Apukhtin may soon find an
English translator.
TALES OF THE REVOLUTION by _Michael Artzibashev_, translated by _Percy
Pinkerton_. (B. W. Huebsch.) The five tales by Artzibashev included in
this volume all have the same quality of bitter irony and mordant
self-analysis. The psychological revelation of the mind that has made
the later phases of the present Russian Revolution possible is complete,
and I know of no book that presents more clearly and truthfully the
rudderless pessimism of these particular spiritual reactions. Such
courageous dissection of the diseased mind has never been undertaken in
American or English fiction, and though its realism is appalling, it is
healthful in its naked frankness.
THE FRIENDS by _Stacy Aumonier_ (The Century Co.). When "The Friends"
was published two years ago in The Century Magazine, it was evident at
once that an important new short-story writer had arrived. The homely
humanity of his characterization was but the evidence of a rich
imaginative talent that found self-expression in the more quiet ways of
life. I said at the time that I believed "The Friends" to be one the
two best short stories of 1915, and others felt it to be the best story
of the year. To "The Friends" have now been added in this volume two
other stories of almost equal distinction,--"The Packet" and "'In the
Way of Business.'" While Mr. Aumonier has a certain didactic intention
in these stories, he has kept it entirely subordinate to the artistry of
his exposition, and it is the few characters which he has added to
English fiction that we remember after his somewhat obvious moral has
been conveyed. His short stories have the same flavor of belated
Victorianism that one enjoys in the novels of William De Morgan, and he
is equally noteworthy in his chosen field.
IRISH IDYLLS by _Jane Barlow_ (Dodd, Mead & Co.). This new edition of
"Irish Idylls" should introduce the admirable studies of Miss Barlow to
a new audience that may not be familiar with what was a pioneer volume
in its day. Published in 1893, it almost marked the beginning of the
Irish literary movement, and so many fine writers followed Miss Barlow
that she has been most unfairly concealed by their shadows. Her studies
of the lives and deaths, joys and sorrows, of Connemara peasants are
none the less real because they are the product of observation by one
who did not live among them. They show, as Miss Barlow says, that "there
are plenty of things beside turf to be found in a bog." It is true that
they represent a slight spirit of condescension, entirely absent from
the work of Padraic Colum, for instance, but they approach far more
closely to the heart of the Irish fishermen and farmers than the work of
any other English type of mind; and although Miss Barlow is best known
today by her poetry, I have always felt that she conveyed more poetry
into "Irish Idylls" than into any other of her books. The volume is a
necessary and permanent edition to any small collection of modern Irish
literature.
DAY AND NIGHT STORIES by _Algernon Blackwood_ (E. P. Dutton & Co.). In
these fifteen short stories Mr. Blackwood has adequately maintained the
quality of his best previous animistic work. To those who found a new
imaginative world in "The Centaur" and "Pan's Garden," the old familiar
magic still has power in many of these stories,--almost completely in
"The Touch of Pan" and "Initiation." Hardly inferior to these stories
for their passionate reality are "The Other Wing," "The Occupant of the
Room," "The Tryst," and "H. S. H." There is no story in this volume
which would not have made the reputation of a new writer, and I can
hardly find a better introduction than "Day and Night Stories" to the
beauty of Mr. Blackwood's imaginative life. He serves the same altar of
beauty in our day that John Keats served a century ago, and I cannot but
believe that his magic will gain greater poignancy as generations pass.
THE DERELICT by _Phyllis Bottome_ (The Century Co.). This collection of
Miss Bottome's short stories, many of which have previously appeared in
the Century Magazine during the past two years, gives a more complete
revelation of her talent than either of her novels. I suspect that the
short story is her true literary medium, and certainly there are at
least six of these eight short stories which I should be compelled to
list with three stars in my annual Roll of Honor. In subject and mood
they range from tragedy to social comedy. Elsewhere in this volume I
have discussed "'Ironstone,'" which seems to me the best of these
stories. A subtle irony pervades them, but it is so definitely concealed
that its insistence is never evident.
OLD CHRISTMAS, AND OTHER KENTUCKY TALES IN VERSE by _William Aspenwall
Bradley_ (The Houghton-Mifflin Co.). In this series of vignettes in
verse Mr. Bradley has presented the Kentucky mountaineer as
imaginatively as Robert Frost has presented the farmer-folk of New
Hampshire in "North of Boston" and "Mountain Interval." The racy humor
of these narratives is thoroughly indigenous, and Mr. Bradley's work has
a vivid dramatic power which challenges successfully a comparison with
the stories of John Fox, Jr. These poems prove Mr. Bradley's rightful
claim to be the first adequate imaginative interpreter of the people who
live in the Cumberland Mountains.
THE FIGHTING MEN by _Alden Brooks_ (Charles Scribner's Sons). Of these
six stories four have been published in Collier's Weekly during the past
two years, and elsewhere I have had occasion to comment upon their
excellence. These narratives may be regarded as separate cantos of a war
epic, which is fairly comparable for its vividness of portrayal to
Stephen Crane's masterpiece, "The Red Badge of Courage." Few writers,
other than these two, have been able to portray the naked ugliness of
warfare, and the passions which warfare engenders, with more brutal
power. Time alone will tell whether these stories have a chance of
permanence, but I am disposed to rank them with that other portrait of
the mercilessness of war, "Under Fire," by Henri Barbusse.
LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS by _Thomas Burke_ (Robert M. McBride & Co.). These
colorful stories of life in London's Chinatown are in my humble belief
destined never to grow old. This volume is the most important volume of
short stories by a new English writer to appear during 1917, and is only
surpassed by Daniel Corkery's volume "A Munster Twilight." Such
patterned prose in fiction has not been known since the days of Walter
Pater, and Mr. Burke's sense of the almost intolerable beauty of ugly
things has a persuasive fascination for the reader who may have a strong
prejudice against his subjects. Such horror as Mr. Burke has imagined is
almost impossible to portray convincingly, yet the author has softened
its starkness into patterns of gracious beauty and musical rhythmic
speech.
RINCONETE AND CORTADILLO by _Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra_, translated
from the Spanish by _Mariano J. Lorente_, with a preface by _R. B.
Cunninghame Graham_ (The Four Seas Co.). This is an excellent
translation by a Spanish man of letters of what is perhaps the best
exemplary Novel by Cervantes. As Mr. Cunninghame Graham points out in
his delightful introduction, "Rinconete and Cortadillo" is perhaps the
best sketch of Spanish low-life that has come down to us. It is highly
amoral, despite its sub-title, and all the more delightful perhaps on
that account. I hope that the translator may be persuaded, if the volume
goes into the second edition it so richly deserves, to omit his very
contentious preface, which can be of interest only to himself and two
other people. Then our delight in this volume would be complete.
THE DUEL (Macmillan), THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE (Scribner), THE LADY
WITH THE DOG (Macmillan), THE PARTY (Macmillan), and ROTHSCHILD'S FIDDLE
(Boni and Liveright) by _Anton Chekhov_. TO THE DARLING, which was the
first volume, so far as I know, of Chekhov, to be presented to the
American public, five new collections of Chekhov's tales have been added
during the past year in excellent English renderings. Three of these
volumes are translated by Constance Garnett, whose superb translations
of Turgenieff and Dostoievsky are well known to American readers.
Because Chekhov ranks with Poe and De Maupassant as one of the three
supreme masters of the short story, it is a matter of signal importance
that these translations should appear, and in them every mood of Russian
life is reflected with subtle artistry and a passionate reality of
creative vision. Chekhov is destined to exert greater and greater
influence on the American short story as the translations of his work
increase, and these five volumes prove him to be fully equal to
Dostoievsky in sustained and varied spiritual observation. These stories
range through the entire gamut of human emotion from sublime tragedy to
the richest and most golden comedy. If I were to choose a single author
of short stories for my library on a desert island, my choice would
inevitably turn to these volumes.
THOSE TIMES AND THESE by _Irvin S. Cobb_ (George H. Doran Co.). This is
quite the best volume of short stories that Mr. Cobb has yet published.
Since "The Escape of Mr. Trimm," which was his first short story, was
printed in the Saturday Evening Post seven years ago, Mr. Cobb's
literary development has been rapid, if not sure; but he may now with
this volume lay claim fairly to the mantle of Mark Twain for the rich
humanity with which he has endowed his substance and the inimitable
humor of his characterizations. In "The Family Tree" and "Cinnamon Seed
and Sandy Bottom" Mr. Cobb has added two stories of permanent value to
American literature, and in "Mr. Felsburg Gets Even" and "And There Was
Light" Mr. Cobb's literary art is almost as well sustained. My only
quarrel with him in this book is for the inclusion of "A Kiss for
Kindness," where a fine short-story possibility seems to have been
entirely missed by the author, perhaps because, as he ingenuously
confessed shortly afterward, he had just become an abandoned farmer.
RUNNING FREE by _James B. Connolly_ (Charles Scribner's Sons). Of the
ten short stories included by Mr. Connolly in this collection, four are
among the best he has ever written: "Breath O' Dawn," "The Sea-Birds,"
"The Medicine Ship," and "One Wireless Night." With the simplicity of
speech which characterizes all of Mr. Connolly's work, he relates his
story for the story's sake. Because he is an Irishman he is an
incorrigible romanticist, and I suspect that characterization interests
him for the story's sake rather than for itself alone. But now that
Richard Harding Davis is dead, I suppose that James B. Connolly may
fairly take his place as our best born yarner, with all a yarner's
privileges.
TEEPEE NEIGHBORS by _Grace Coolidge_ (The Four Seas Co.). This quiet
little book of narratives and Indian portraits by Miss Coolidge deserves
more attention than it has yet received, and for its qualities of quiet
pathos and sympathetic insight into the Indian character I associate it
as of equal value with Margaret Prescott Montague's stories of blind
children in West Virginia.
A MUNSTER TWILIGHT by _Daniel Corkery_ (Frederick A. Stokes Co.). I have
never read a new volume of short stories with such a sense of discovery
as I felt when these tales came to my hand. Because the volume appears
to have attracted absolutely no attention as yet in this country, I wish
to emphasize my firm belief that this is the most memorable volume of
short stories published in English within the past five years. It makes
us eager to read Mr. Corkery's new novel, "The Threshold of Quiet," in
order that we may see if such a glorious imaginative sweep can be
maintained in a novel as the reader will find in any single short story
of this volume. Here you will find the very heart of Ireland's spiritual
adventure revealed in folk speech of inevitable beauty. There is not a
story in the book which does not disclose new aspects after repeated
readings. A craftsmanship so fine and vigorous is seldom related with
such artistic humility. "A Munster Twilight" proves that there are still
great men in Ireland.
BROUGHT FORWARD, FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY, PROGRESS, and SUCCESS by _R. B.
Cunninghame Graham_ (Frederick A. Stokes Co.). It is an extraordinary
fact that a short-story writer so deservedly well-known in England as
Mr. Cunninghame Graham, whose sketches of life in many parts of the
globe have been published at frequent intervals through the past decade,
is yet entirely unknown in this country. To be sure, such has been the
fate of W. H. Hudson until very recently. These six volumes certainly
rank, by virtue of the quality of their style and the imaginative
reality of their substance, with the best work of Mr. Hudson, and the
parallel is the more complete because both writers have made the
vanished life of the South American plains real to the English mind. Mr.
Cunninghame Graham is one of the great travel writers, and ranks with
Borrow and Ford, but he is more impartially interested in character than
either Borrow or Ford, and has a far more vivid feeling for the
spiritual values of landscape. It may be that these stories are for the
few only, but I am loth to believe it. The life of the pampas and the
life of the Moroccan desert live in these pages with an actuality as
great as the life of the American plains lives in the work of Hamlin
Garland, and there is an epic sweep in Mr. Cunninghame Graham's vision
that I find in no other contemporary English writer.
THE ECHO OF VOICES by _Richard Curle_ (Alfred A. Knopf). It is very
rarely that a disciple as faithful as Mr. Curle publishes a volume which
his master would be proud to sign, but I think that the reader will
detect in this book the authentic voice of Joseph Conrad. Mr. Conrad's
own personal enthusiasm for the book is an ingratiating introduction to
the reader, but in these eight stories Mr. Curle can certainly afford to
stand alone. Preoccupied as he is with the mystery of human existence,
and the effect of circumstance upon the character, he portrays eight
widely different human types, almost all of them with a certain pathetic
futility of aspect, so surely and finely that they live before us. It is
an interesting fact that the three best short story books in English of
1917 come from the other side of the water. "Limehouse Nights," "A
Munster Twilight," and "The Echo of Voices" make this year so memorable
in fiction that later years may well prove disappointing.
THE ETERNAL HUSBAND AND OTHER STORIES and THE GAMBLER AND OTHER STORIES
by _Fyodor Dostoievsky_ (The Macmillan Co.). These two new volumes
continue the complete English edition of Dostoievsky which is being
translated by Constance Garnett. The renderings have the same qualities
of idiomatic speech and subtly rendered nuance which is always to be
found in this translator's work, and although both of these volumes
represent the minor work of Dostoievsky, his minor work is finer than
our major work, and characterized by a passionate curiosity about the
human soul and a deep insight into its mysteries. It is idle to argue as
to whether these narratives are short stories or brief novels. However
we classify them, they are profound revelations of human relationship,
and place their author among the great masters of the world's
literature. Nor is it pertinent to discuss their technique or lack of
it. Their technique is sufficient for the author's purpose, and he has
achieved his will nobly in a manner inevitable to him.
BILLY TOPSAIL, M.D., by _Norman Duncan_ (Fleming H. Revell Co.). In this
posthumous volume Norman Duncan has woven together a selection of his
later short stories, in which further adventures of Doctor Luke of the
Labrador are chronicled. They represent the very best of his later work,
and in them the stern physical conditions with which nature surrounds
the life of man provide an admirably rendered background for the
portrayal of character developed by circumstance. Norman Duncan can
never have a successor, and in "Billy Topsail, M.D." the reader will
find him very nearly at his best.
MY PEOPLE by _Caradoc Evans_ (Duffield & Co.). "My People" is a record
of the peasantry of West Wales, and these chronicles are set down with a
biblical economy of speech that makes for a noteworthy literary style. I
refuse to believe that they are a truthful portrait of the folk of whom
Mr. Evans writes, but I believe that he has created a real subjective
world of his own that is thoroughly convincing. H. G. Wells has written
eulogistically of the book and also of the author's novel, "Capel Sion."
I appreciate the qualities in the book that have won Mr. Wells' esteem,
and the book is indeed memorable. But I believe that its excellence is
an artificial excellence, and I commend it to the reader as a work of
incomparable artifice rather than as a faithful reflection of life.
IN HAPPY VALLEY by _John Fox, Jr._ (Charles Scribner's Sons). Of these
ten new chronicles of the Kentucky mountains, gathered from the pages of
Scribner's Magazine during the past year for the most part, "His Last
Christmas Gift" is the most memorable. But all the stories are brief and
vivid vignettes of the countryside which Mr. Fox knows so well, told
with the utmost economy of speech and with a fine sense of atmospheric
values. These stories are a happy illustration of the better regionalism
that is characteristic of contemporary American fiction, and like
"Ommirandy" will prove valuable records to a later generation of a life
that even now is rapidly passing away.
THE WAR, MADAME, by _Paul Géraldy_ (Charles Scribner's Sons). The
delicate fantasy of this little story only enhances the poignant tragedy
that it discloses. Somehow it suggests a comparison with "Four Days" by
Hetty Hemenway, although it is told with greater deftness and a more
subtle irony. In these pages pulses the very heart of France, and it is
compact of the spirit that has made France a mistress to die for. The
translation is admirable.
COLLECTED POEMS by _Wilfrid Wilson Gibson_ (The Macmillan Co.). In these
noble studies of English social life among the laboring classes Mr.
Gibson has collected all of his stories in verse which he wishes to
retain in his collected works. He has already become an influence on the
work of many of his contemporaries, and the qualities of incisive
observation, warm humanity, and subtle art which characterize his best
work are adequately disclosed in his poems. I am sure that the reader of
short stories will find them as fascinating as any volume of prose
published this year, and the sum of all these poems is an English
_Comédie Humaine_ which portrays every type of English labor in rich
imaginative speech. The dramatic quality of these stories is achieved by
virtue of a constant economy of selection, and a nervous singing speech
as authentic as that of Synge.
OMMIRANDY by _Armistead C. Gordon_ (Charles Scribner's Sons). In this
collection Mr. Gordon, whose name is so happily associated with that of
Thomas Nelson Page, has collected from the files of Scribner's Magazine
the deft and insinuating chronicles of negro life on a Virginia
plantation which have attracted so much favorable comment in recent
years. This collection places Mr. Gordon in the same rank as the author
of "Marse' Chan," as a literary artist of the vanished South. These
transcripts from the folk life of the people are told very quietly in a
persuasive style that reveals a rich poetic sense of human values. The
mellow atmosphere of these stories is particularly noteworthy, and Mr.
Gordon's instinctive sympathy with his subject has saved him from that
spirit of condescension which has been the weakness of so much American
folk writing in the past. "Ommirandy" will long remain a happy and
honorable tradition in American literature.
THE GRIM 13, edited by _Frederick Stuart Greene_ (Dodd, Mead & Co.), is
a collection of thirteen stories of literary value which have been
declined with enthusiastic praise by the editors of American magazines
because of their grim quality, or because they have an extremely unhappy
ending. The collection was gathered as a test of the public interest, in
order to remove if possible what the editor believed to be a false
editorial policy. It is interesting to examine these stories, and to
pretend that one is an editor. The experiment has been extremely
successful and has produced at least one story by an American author
("The Abigail Sheriff Memorial" by Vincent O'Sullivan) and one story by
an English author ("Old Fags" by Stacy Aumonier), which are permanent in
their literary value.
FOUR DAYS: THE STORY OF A WAR MARRIAGE, by _Hetty Hemenway_ (Little,
Brown & Co.). Of this story I have spoken elsewhere in this volume, I
shall only add here that it is one of the most significant spiritual
studies in fiction that the war has produced, and that it is directly
told in a style of sensitive beauty.
A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES by _Rudyard Kipling_ (Doubleday, Page & Co.) is
the first collection of Mr. Kipling's short stories published in several
years. I must confess frankly that there is but one story in the volume
which seems to me a completely realized rendering of the substance which
Mr. Kipling has chosen, and that is the incomparable satire on publicity
entitled "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat." In this volume you
will find many stories in many moods, and some of them are postscripts
to earlier volumes of Mr. Kipling. I cannot believe that his war stories
deserve as high praise as they have been accorded. This volume presents
Mr. Kipling as the most consummate living master of technique in the
English tongue, but his inspiration has failed him except for the single
exception which I have chronicled. The volume is a memory rather than an
actuality, and it has the pathos of a forgotten dream.
THE BRACELET OF GARNETS AND OTHER STORIES by _Alexander Kuprin_,
translated by _Leo Pasvolsky_, with an Introduction by _William Lyon
Phelps_ (Charles Scribner's Sons). This collection of stories is based
on the author's own selection for this purpose, and although the
translation is not thoroughly idiomatic, the sheer poetry of Kuprin's
imagination shines through the veil of an alien speech and captures the
imagination of the reader. Kuprin's pictorial sense is curiously similar
to that of Wilbur Daniel Steele, and it is interesting to study the
reactions of similar temperaments on widely different substances and
backgrounds. Kuprin achieves a chiselled finality of utterance which is
as evident in his tragedy as in his comedy, and in some of these pieces
a fine allegorical beauty shines prismatically through a carefully
economized brilliance of narrative.
THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER AND OTHER STORIES by _D. H. Lawrence_ (B. W.
Huebsch). The twelve short stories collected in this volume are full of
the same warm color that one always associates with Mr. Lawrence's best
work, and the nervous complaining beauty of his style makes him the
English compeer of Gabriele d'Annunzio. The warm lush fragrance of many
European countrysides pervades these stories and a certain poignant
sensual disillusionment is insistently stressed by the characters who
flit through the shadowy foreground. It is the definitely realized and
concrete sense of landscape that Mr. Lawrence has achieved which is his
finest artistic attribute, and the sensitive response to light which is
so characteristic an element in his vision bathes all the pictures he
presents in a rich glow, whose gradations of light and shadow respond
finely to the emotional reactions of his characters. He is the most
sophisticated of the contemporary English realists, and has the sense of
poetry to a high degree which is conspicuously absent in the work of
other English novelists.
A DESIGNER OF DAWNS AND OTHER TALES by _Gertrude Russell Lewis_ (Pilgrim
Press). I set this volume of allegories beside "Flame and the
Shadow-Eater" by Henrietta Weaver as one of the two best books of
allegories published in 1917. These seven little tales have a quiet
imaginative glow that is very appealing and I find in them a folk
quality that is almost Scandinavian in its naïvete.
THE TERROR: A MYSTERY, by _Arthur Machen_ (Robert M. McBride & Co.).
When this story was first published in the Century Magazine in 1917,
under the title of "The Coming of the Terror," it was at once hailed by
discriminating readers as the best short story by an English writer
published in an American magazine since "The Friends" by Stacy Aumonier.
It is now published in its complete form as originally written, and
although it is as long as a short novel, it has an essential unity of
incident which justifies us in claiming it as a short story. I suppose
that Algernon Blackwood is the only other English writer who has the
same gift for making strange spiritual adventures completely real to the
imagination, and the author of "The Bowmen" has surpassed even that fine
story in this description of how a mysterious terror overran England
during the last years of the great war and how the mystery of its
passing was finally revealed. The emotional tension of the reader is
enhanced by the quiet matter-of-fact air with which the story is
presented. The volume is one of the best five or six books of short
stories which England has produced during the past year.
THE SECOND ODD NUMBER: THIRTEEN TALES, by _Guy de Maupassant_, the
translation by _Charles Henry White_, an Introduction by _William Dean
Howells_ (Harper & Brothers). It is reported in some volume of French
literary memoirs that Guy de Maupassant regarded the first series of
"The Odd Number" as better than the original. Be this as it may, the
thirteen stories which make up this volume are admirably rendered with a
careful reflection of the slightest nuances. As Mr. Howells states in
his introduction to the volume: "The range of these stories is not very
great; the effect they make is greater than the range." But this
selection has been admirably chosen with a view to making the range as
wide as possible, and I can only hope that it will serve to influence
some of our younger writers toward a greater descriptive and emotional
economy.
THE GIRL AND THE FAUN by _Eden Phillpotts_ (J. B. Lippincott Co.). These
eight idylls of the four seasons are graceful Greek legends told with a
modern touch in poetic prose. They have a quality of quiet beauty which
will commend them to many readers to whom the more realistic work of Mr.
Phillpotts does not appeal, and the admirable illustrations by Frank
Brangwyn are a felicitous accompaniment to the modulated prose of Mr.
Phillpotts.
BARBED WIRE AND OTHER POEMS by _Edwin Ford Piper_ (The Midland Press,
Moorhead, Minn.). As Grant Showerman's "A Country Chronicle" is an
admirable rendering of the farm life of Wisconsin in the seventies, so
these poems are a fine imaginative record of the pioneer life of
Nebraska a little later. I believe this volume to contain quite as fine
poetry as Robert Frost's "North of Boston." Here you will meet many men
and women struggling against the loneliness of prairie life, and winning
spiritual as well as material conquests out of nature. The greater part
of this volume is composed of a series of narrative poems entitled "The
Neighborhood." Their lack of literary sophistication is part of their
charm, and the calculated ruggedness of the author's style is a faithful
reflection of his barren physical background.
BEST RUSSIAN SHORT STORIES, compiled and edited by _Thomas Seltzer_
(Boni and Liveright). This is the first anthology of Russian short
stories which has yet been published in English, and the selections are
excellent. There is a wide range of literary art represented in this
volume, and the translations are extremely smooth and idiomatic. As is
only fitting, the work of Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and other
Russians, whose work is already well known to the American reader, are
only represented lightly in the collection, and greater space is
devoted to the stories of Chekhov and other writers less familiar to the
American public. Nineteen stories are translated from the work of
Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, Saltykov, Korolenko,
Garshin, Chekhov, Sologub, Potapenko, Semyonov, Gorky, Andreyev,
Artzybashev, and Kuprin, and the volume is prefixed with an excellent
critical introduction by the editor.
A COUNTRY CHILD by _Grant Showerman_ (The Century Co.). This is a sequel
to Professor Showerman's earlier volume, "A Country Chronicle." The book
is an epic of what a little boy saw and felt and dreamed on a farm in
Wisconsin forty years ago, told just as a little boy would tell it. It
will help you to remember how you went to the circus and how you stayed
up late on your birthday. You will also recall the ball game the day you
didn't go home from school, and how you went in swimming, and about that
fight with Bill, and ever so many other things which you thought that
you had forgotten. I think all the boys and girls that used to write to
James Whitcomb Riley should send a birthday letter this year to Grant
Showerman, so that he will get it on the 9th of January. Let's start a
movement in Wisconsin to have a Showerman Day.
FLAME AND THE SHADOW-EATER by _Henrietta Weaver_ (Henry Holt & Co.). In
these fifteen short allegorical tales Henrietta Weaver has introduced
with considerable skill much Persian philosophy, and presented it to the
American reader so attractively that it is thoroughly persuasive. Akin
in a measure to certain similar stories by Jeannette Marks, they have
the same prismatic quality of brilliance and impermanence. I do not
believe that the reader who enjoys the poetry of the mind will find
these allegories specially esoteric, but I may commend them frankly for
their story value, irrespective of the symbols which the author has
chosen to attach to them.
THE GREAT MODERN FRENCH STORIES edited by _Willard Huntington Wright_
(Boni and Liveright), MARRIED by _August Strindberg_ (Boni and
Liveright), and VISIONS by _Count Ilya Tolstoy_ (James B. Pond) have
reached me too late for extended review. I list them here as three
volumes of permanent literary value.