Books: Good Stories

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1927— Edited by Edward J. O’Brien—Dodd, Mead ($2.50). Superlatives are dangerous. Yet it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to arrange a more generally satisfying collection than the one which Editor O’Brien makes it his annual business to compile. Ernest Hemingway’s famed The Killers, about two men who go into a lunch counter looking for a man they want to murder; Owen Wister’s story about the card sharping son of a British lord; Joseph Hergesheimer’s Triall by Armes, winding the suave coils of its prose around the mind of a millionaire’s daughter who has married a multimillionaire’s somewhat fragile son; Good Morning, Major, in which J. P. Marquand accentuates a melodramatic moment in the old army game; Meridel Le Sueur’s Persephone; Sherwood Anderson’s Another Wife; these stories would finish ahead of the field in any literary sweepstakes. All the other stories are good ones.