The Rose-Bush of a Thousand Years, by Mabel Wagnalls (Funk & Wagnalls Company). When the first part of this book was published in a magazine during 1916 its story value instantly attracted my attention, and later it became familiar to a wider public through the screen version in which Madame Nazimova took the principal part. The present reprint has been long called for, and would have gained if the crude and inartistic second part had been omitted. It forms no essential part of the story and is clearly an addition dictated by supposed moving picture demands.
A Book of Short Stories, edited by Blanche Colton Williams (D. Appleton and Company). This collection of thirteen stories for high schools is an admirable collection along well-trodden paths, and to it is added a wealth of biographical and critical material, well-ordered and clearly exposed. The general reader will wish to have the volume on his shelves, because it renders accessible for the first time in book form Major Frederick Stuart Greene’s remarkable story, “Molly McGuire, Fourteen.” It is the finest testimony I know of the quality of Dr. Williams’ teaching that a pupil of hers should have produced so notable a story in her classrooms.
A Gray Dream, by Laura Wolcott (Yale University Press). This collection of short stories and reminiscences has all the quiet glow of Indian summer, dreaming over the past with serene conviction and an unconquerable youth of the spirit. The best that New England Puritanism had to reveal is chronicled in these stories, which will remind more than one reader of Emily Dickinson. They have a finished style which achieves its end without undue pomp and circumstance.
The Scarecrow and Other Stories, by G. Ranger Wormser (E. P. Dutton & Company). These stories by Miss Wormser are the most interesting short story discovery of the year. They are subtle studies in unfamiliar regions of the spirit, and their vivid imaginative quality is not unlike that of Algernon Blackwood, though Miss Wormser’s style is somewhat more self-conscious. I believe that this volume heralds a remarkable future.
II. English and Irish Authors
The Tideway, by “John Ayscough” (Benziger Brothers). This collection of stories has much of Henry Harland’s charm, with a more complete mastery of plot. These stories are, many of them, studies in social atmosphere, and if their substance is tenuous, Monsignor Bickerstaffe-Drew has made the most of it.
Johnny Pryde, by J. J. Bell (Fleming H. Revell Company). The dry merriment of this little book is infectious, and makes it a worthy successor to the best of Wee Macgreegor’s earlier adventures.
The Empty House, John Silence, The Listener, and The Lost Valley, by Algernon Blackwood (E. P. Dutton & Company). The present reprint of four of Algernon Blackwood’s earlier collections of short stories gives me the opportunity to call attention to four books for which I care more personally than for the short stories of any other English writer. No contemporary has continued the magic tradition of Keats and Coleridge more successfully than Mr. Blackwood, particularly in “The Listener” and “The Lost Valley.” These two books at least will last longer than any other volume of short stories by an English or American writer published this year.
The Watcher by the Threshold, by John Buchan (George H. Doran Company). Seven or eight years ago a remarkable book of animistic stories by a writer then unknown to me was issued in this country. It at once awakened my enthusiasm for the writer’s work, and I felt that an important new figure had come into view. But “The Moon Endureth” attracted almost no attention and has since been forgotten. Mr. Buchan has published other pleasant books since then but the present collection is the first to recapture something of the same beauty, and in recommending it cordially to the public I earnestly hope that Mr. Buchan’s publishers will find it possible to reissue “The Moon Endureth.”
Nights in London, by Thomas Burke (Henry Holt & Company). Strictly speaking, this is not a volume of short stories, but to those who greatly admired “Limehouse Nights” last year this volume will be found to hold the same fascination of style and to make clearer the human background out of which that book flowered.