Challenge, by Louise Untermeyer. [The Century Co., New York.] Virile and ambitious songs of the present. Caliban in the Coal Mines, Any City, Strikers, In the Subway, The Heretic, show that the poet is not a shrinker from modern life. The title poem sounds the keynote:
The quiet and courageous night,
The keen vibration of the stars
Call me, from morbid peace, to fight
The world’s forlorn and desperate wars.
John Ward, M.D., by Charles Vale. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Seneschal sentimentality with a “modern” plot woven about the questionable science of eugenics. One of those irritating books in which one reads page after page after page in the vain endeavor to find out why Mitchell Kennerly spent his money on it.
Forum Stories, selected by Charles Vale. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] All these stories have appeared in The Forum since it came under Mr. Kennerley’s management, and they are all by American writers. They represent the work not only of such well known writers as Reginald Wright Kauffman, James Hopper, Margaret Widdemer, and John S. Reed—who has a tense little narrative of the struggle toward land of two swimmers wrecked in the Pacific Ocean—but the work of several lesser known but promising authors. Among them is Miss Florence Kiper, of Chicago, who writes under the title I Have Borne My Lord a Son a most penetrating study of the psychology of motherhood.
Papa, by Zoë Akins. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A little play which shows so much determination to be clever and very, very naughty that it’s almost a pity it doesn’t succeed.
Saint Louis: a Civic Masque, by Percy MacKaye. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.] A valuable contribution to the dramatic “spirit” of awakening civic intelligence.
Great Days, by Frank Harris. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Audacious, vivid, gripping sex experiences of the son of an immoral English innkeeper. The big rough brother of Three Weeks.