Fiction: Recent Books: Mar. 22, 1937

CENTRAL STANDARD TIME — Harlan Hatcher’—Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Wisecrackly tale, told in a peculiar adaptation of the football chalktalk, presenting an Ohio manufacturing family as the profit-and-lost generation of 1934.

VERY HEAVEN — Richard Aldington— Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Portrait of a savagely embittered young man whose family’s bankruptcy, forcing him to leave college, sets him to discovering the world’s bankruptcy generally, England’s particularly. Intent on vigorous effect, Author Aldington’s hand now and then unfortunately goes straight through the canvas.

SPANISH PRELUDE — Jenny Ballou— Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). Sensitive, multi-charactered story portraying the intellectual and middle-class Spanish acquaintances of an American woman during the three years preceding King Alfonso’s overthrow.

YOUNG ROBERT—George Albee—Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50). Appealing tale about the hell-raising poetic son of a fabulous San Francisco clan.

AUGUST FOLLY — Angela Thirkell — Knopf ($2). Nimble comedy, relating the romantic mixups engendered when a self-important Oxford undergraduate falls in love with the mother of a populous and erratic family.

MARA — Stoyan Christowe — Crowell ($2). Story of a youthful Macedonian terrorist in the gory fight against Turkish oppression before 1912; a first novel, done with folktale simplicity, by the author of Heroes and Assassins.

BITTER GLORY—Leon Thornber—Fur-man ($2.50). Heavily romanticized version of the free-love life of fragile Chopin and trousered, vigorous George Sand.

IT WASN’T A NIGHTMARE—L. F. Hay— Macmillan ($2). A middle-aged English novelist and his ward uncover the black doings of a Balkans munitions-maker; a first book by a veteran British secret agent whose fictive boiling point is lower than Oppenheim’s.

BUSMAN’S HONEYMOON — Dorothy L. Sayers—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50). Peter and Harriet (Gaudy Night, TIME, Feb. 24, 1936) spend their honeymoon in an ancient English farmhouse and discover smoking fireplaces, eccentric neighbors, cold-blooded murder and—a greater understanding.

Non-Fiction

ROAD MY BODY GOES—Clifford Gessler —Reynal & Hitchcock ($3.50). A tourist-free island of the South Seas described by a Honolulu newspaperman who spent a picturesque three months there, warns his readers away by saying the mosquitoes reek with elephantiasis germs.

THE SWAN OF LICHFIELD—Edited by Hesketh Pearson — Oxford University Press ($3.50). Selected correspondence of Anna Seward, an 18th Century highbrow journalist whose indiscreet literary anecdotes and witty rhetoric tickled her contemporaries, but “nauseated” the next generation’s Victorians, who called her Johnsonian anecdotes an outrage.

THIS LIFE I’VE LOVED—Isobel Field— Longmans, Green ($3). The step-daughter of Robert Louis Stevenson recalls with a benevolent serenity unusual in artists’ memoirs, her varied life in Nevada mining camps, San Francisco’s art colony, Hawaiian King Kalakaua’s court, in Samoa as amanuensis to Stevenson during his last days.

OXE MIGHTY TORRENT—Edgar Johnson —Stackpole ($3.50). A book about biography, interpreting with “bold emphasis and omission” the development of English biography down to Lincoln Steffens’ Autobiography.

FORWARD FROM LIBERALISM—Stephen Spender—Random House ($2). Depersonalized testament of much-touted Poet Spender’s “personal” approach to communism—with a small “c” to indicate his political celibacy.

LOOK THROUGH THE BARS — Ernst Toller—Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75). Letters and poems written during a five-year political imprisonment (1919-1924) by a now exiled German poet-playwright.

WILL SHAKSPERE: FACTOTUM AND AGENT — Alden Brooks — Round Table Press ($3). Somebody else tries to prove that Shakspere, the country cutup, could not have written Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Iconoclast Brooks says the real “Shakespeare” was a syndicate (Marlowe, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Nashe et al.}.

Murders NINE DOCTORS AND A MADMAN—Elizabeth Curtiss—Simon & Schuster ($2).

Blame for the murder of an eminent staff doctor of an impeccable mental hospital is not so easily put on an insane inmate when police learn that the victim was unloved by all of his associates.

THE CAT CLIMBS—C. A. Tarrant— Lippincott ($2). A mousy little clerk accidentally becomes a gentlemanly crook by night, worries his old landlady, a woman boarder and all of Scotland Yard, while amassing a fortune, without murder, for a “Sacred Cause.” THE MOONSTONE AND THE WOMAN IN WHITE—Wilkie Collins—Modern Library ($1.10). Reprint, in readable type, of two detective classics; with an introduction by Alexander Woollcott. The first and probably the best, full-length detective novel, The Moonstone has had a U. S. reputation confined mostly to hearsay.