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.