Books: Persimmons, Etc.

GRITNY PEOPLE—R. Emmet Kennedy—Dodd-Mead ($2.50). Author Kennedy brings the colored talent of Gretna, across the river from New Orleans, to Aunt Susan’s cookshop where they tell their tales and croon their tunes. The reader may be gripped with pathos, shaken with laughter—if he escapes suffocation in the cloud of dialect which pervades the book from cover to cover. There is also a spirit of ineffable quaintness at times a bit trying. Gritny People is, perhaps, less fiction than a study of primitive Negro character and lore.