The Yearbook for 1918 contains three new features. I have compiled an index of all short stories published in a selected list of volumes issued during the year; another index is devoted to critical articles on the short story, and noteworthy reviews published in English and American magazines and newspapers this year; and I have added exact volume and page references to the index of short stories published in American magazines.
As in past years it has been my pleasure and honor to associate this annual with the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews Hallet, and Wilbur Daniel Steele, whose stories, “Zelig,” “Making Port,” and “Ching, Ching, Chinaman,” seemed to me respectively the best short stories of 1915, 1916, and 1917, so it is my wish this year to dedicate the best that I have found in the American magazines as the fruit of my labors to Arthur Johnson, whose stories, “The Little Family,” “His New Mortal Coil,” and “The Visit of the Master” seem to me to be among the finest imaginative contributions to the short story made by an American artist this year.
Edward J. O’Brien.
Bass River, Massachusetts,
November 6, 1918.
[THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1918]
[A SIMPLE ACT OF PIETY]
By ACHMED ABDULLAH
From The All-Story Weekly
Copyright, 1918, by The Frank A. Munsey Co.
Copyright, 1919, by Achmed Abdullah.
His affair that night was prosy. He was intending the murder of an old Spanish woman around the corner, on the Bowery, whom he had known for years, with whom he had always exchanged courteous greetings, and whom he neither liked nor disliked.