aved him from that
spirit of condescension which has been the weakness of so much American
folk writing in the past. "Ommirandy" will long remain a happy and
honorable tradition in American literature.

THE GRIM 13, edited by _Frederick Stuart Greene_ (Dodd, Mead & Co.), is
a collection of thirteen stories of literary value which have been
declined with enthusiastic praise by the editors of American magazines
because of their grim quality, or because they have an extremely unhappy
ending. The collection was gathered as a test of the public interest, in
order to remove if possible what the editor believed to be a false
editorial policy. It is interesting to examine these stories, and to
pretend that one is an editor. The experiment has been extremely
successful and has produced at least one story by an American author
("The Abigail Sheriff Memorial" by Vincent O'Sullivan) and one story by
an English author ("Old Fags" by Stacy Aumonier), which are permanent in
their literary value.

FOUR DAYS: THE STORY OF A WAR MARRIAGE, by _Hetty Hemenway_ (Little,
Brown & Co.). Of this story I have spoken elsewhere in this volume, I
shall only add here that it is one of the most significant spiritual
studies in fiction that the war has produced, and that it is directly
told in a style of sensitive beauty.

A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES by _Rudyard Kipling_ (Doubleday, Page & Co.) is
the first collection of Mr. Kipling's short stories published in several
years. I must confess frankly that there is but one story in the volume
which seems to me a completely realized rendering of the substance which
Mr. Kipling has chosen, and that is the incomparable satire on publicity
entitled "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat." In this volume you
will find many stories in many moods, and some of them are postscripts
to earlier volumes of Mr. Kipling. I cannot believe that his war stories
deserve as high praise as they have been accorded. This volume presents
Mr. Kipling as the most consummate living master of technique in the
English tongue, but his inspiration has failed him except for the single
exception which I have chronicled. The volume is a memory rather than an
actuality, and it has the pathos of a forgotten dream.

THE BRACELET OF GARNETS AND OTHER STORIES by _Alexander Kuprin_,
translated by _Leo Pasvolsky_, with an Introduction by _William Lyon
Phelps_ (Charles Scribner's Sons). This collection of stories is based
on the author's o