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THE BOOKMAN'S GUIDE TO FICTION

THE BOOKMAN will present each month tabloid reviews of a selected list of recent fiction. This section will include also the books most in demand according to the current reports in "Books of the Month", compiled by the R. R. Bowker Company, The Baker and Taylor Company's "Retail Bookseller", and "THE BOOKMAN'S Monthly Score". Such books as the editor specially recommends are marked with a star.

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- A. Hamilton Gibbs Little, Brown. More proof that woman cannot resist the right man even though he be wrong.

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*THE CONSTANT NYMPH - Margaret Kennedy-Doubleday, Page. Unusual characters developed with great piquancy. Perfect proof of the growing popularity of the unconventional.

Peter B. Kyne

THE ENCHANTED HILL Cosmopolitan. With what enchantment this Irishman manages to weave a love story that appears different and is still a thriller!

THE

TREASURE - Selma Lagerlöf Doubleday, Page. Wherein the gifted author goes back to the sixteenth century to tell a short and simple tale with gentle artistry.

SNUFFS AND BUTTERS Ellen N. LaMotte Century. In these tales of alien races, Miss LaMotte displays the sensitive feel of a blind man's finger tips; also, to carry the simile further, her stories convey the outline and leave us to conjecture the color.

MEMOIRS OF ARSÈNE LUPIN - Maurice LeBlanc Macaulay. Though fantastic and slightly pompous in style, this is still a well told crime story.

DEAD RIGHT- Jennette Lee - Scribner. Love in a garden, chaperoned by a clever, good looking female detective who foils the serpent.

*ARROWSMITH Sinclair Lewis - Harcourt, Brace. This literary surgeon performs an operation on the medical profession in his finest book.

RUGGED WATER - Joseph C. Lincoln Appleton. Rough and ready life savers

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SANDALWOOD - Fulton Oursler -Macaulay. Blunt realism marks this tale of a love affair between a beautiful Sybarite and a spiritual coward.

INVISIBLE WOUNDS - Frederick Palmer Dodd, Mead. Enough romance, mystery, good writing, and war to make it well, at least a lieutenant in the combat division of best sellers.

THE CHASE - Mollie Panter-Downes Putnam. It is difficult to disassociate the seventeen year old author's age from her work, but judged on its merits this second novel is well written and shows promise of finer things to come.

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THE EDITOR RECOMMENDS —

BOOKS THAT MAY HAVE
ESCAPED YOU

1. "Cobb of 'The World"" by John L. Heaton a collection of the most forceful editorials ever written in America.

2. “The Singing Season” by Isabel Paterson - a costume romance written with much beauty.

3. "Liza of Lambeth" by W. Somerset Maugham an early short novel that has power and drama.

4. "How to Write Short Stories" by Ring Lardner - with the reissue of his books, this stands out; if it is not the most amusing, it is surely among the best.

5. "The Old Maid" by Edith Wharton one of the novelettes grouped as "Old New York", and one of the finest stories this great writer has ever given us.

T

Society and the Fringe

group Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald may seem, at first glance, ridiculous; but if you will read "The Mother's Recompense" and then "The Great Gatsby", I think you will discover my reason. In one, we find a mature woman, with an amazing tolerance of life and an understanding of its smallest values, writing with force and clarity on a theme as tremendous as any she has ever touched. In the other, a brilliant young man, immensely puzzled by life and disturbed by shifting values in his own scheme, writes vividly but chaotically on theme that is as tremendous but scarcely as clear. "The Mother's Recompense" (Appleton) is, it seems to me, the best story Mrs. Wharton has

ever written. It is the same in theme as a rather lame play which flared forth on Broadway recently for a week, "Ostriches". A man falls in love with a former mistress's daughter. The plot is as simple as that; but in the character of Kate Clephane we have delicacy and complication of emotion that is dramatic and poignant. Wharton tells this story swiftly, and with her usual command of masses of dialogue. She does not attempt to explain differences in the generations. She shifts from the Riviera to New York gracefully and with a complete understanding of both moods. I think

Mrs.

she has achieved an even greater understanding of the mother-daughter relation than Edna Ferber evinced of that of mother and son in "So Big". To be sure, "The Mother's Recompense" is not always pleasant reading. It is painful, exceedingly painful, and cruel. This author never spares heroines; with unflinching zeal she lets us see their souls. Kate Clephane is so human that she terrifies, and her tortures and psychological adventures hold the reader as do few mystery stories, for in this novel suspense plays a large part. Actually, we do not know the solution until the final page, and it is a solution in which we are vitally interested.

"The Great Gatsby" (Scribner) is a strange combination of satire, burlesque, fantasy, and melodrama. It is Fitzgerald writing with his old gusto, with driving imagination, and with a sense of the futility of life and of the constant presence of bootleggers. A hideous and grotesque comedy this, yet a comedy in which truth lurks where the thread of the tale seems least plaus

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