Fiction: Recent Books: Aug. 22, 1938

PRAY TO THE EARTH—Evelyn Eaton—Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). A proper picaresque novel, as concentrated as a dried prune, about a rapscallion French peasant.

THE WAY THINGS ARE—Albert Maltz —International ($2}. Violent stories of the “proletarian” ilk. Best: Man on the Road, about a hitchhiking miner who has caught silicosis in Gauley Bridge. W. Va. and cannot decide whom to blame for it.

Non-Fiction

THE NAZI PRIMER—translated by Harwood L. Childs—Harper ($1.75). Anthropology, history and politics for the 7,000,000 members of the Hitlerjugend. Aryans are tall, blond, truthful, uncommonly gifted mentally and they do not talk too loud; Jews, Marxists, Free Masons and Christians should be kept well in hand for their own good.

THE WRITINGS OF E. M. FORSTER—Rose Macaulay—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50). Fourteen years after Forster’s novel, A Passage To India, his slow-growing reputation has landed him solidly among the best contemporary English novelists. Author Macaulay makes a sensitive analysis of Forster’s fiction, a weaker analysis of his critical writing, is both baffled and protective in dealing with his abandonment of fiction for fugitive social and literary criticism.