nary
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