[Inclusion in this category does not preclude a more extended notice.]

The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser [John Lane Company, New York], will be reviewed at length in the July issue.

Clay and Fire, by Layton Crippen. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] A provocative philosophical discussion of the basal problem of religion by an author who treats pessimism according to the homeopathic principle. Reasonable hopes are made to seem hopeless. A morbid retrospectiveness may, however, force thought into light, and the book leaves one in a strange illumination effected by spiritual fire.

At the Sign of the Van, by Michael Monahan. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] These essays include The Log of the Papyrus with Other Escapades in Life and Letters. Whether he is praising Percival Pollard, explaining Whitman’s cosmic consciousness—which he did to a Whitman Fellowship gathering—or wistfully telling us how he would like to have had a look in on the doings in Babylon, the amorous dallyings which Jeremiah muckraked in the name of his Comstockean Jehovah, Michael Monahan is always interesting even if he is not always as stormy as his designation “the stormy petrel of literature” would indicate. In truth it would take a number of birds of different species—but all pleasant ones—to make up the tale of the qualities which this versatile essayist exhibits in these pages.

Aphrodite and Other Poems, by John Helston. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] Mr. Helston does not write great poetry,—though he comes close to very good poetry at times,—but he writes greatly about love. His attitude is a refusal to divorce the spiritual from the earthly with which we have a hearty sympathy. No franker love poetry has been written, probably; but somehow we failed to find in it the sensuality that its critics have discovered. It is richly pagan.

Love of One’s Neighbor, by Leonid Andreyev. [Albert and Charles Boni, New York.] A very excellent translation of a one-act play which will probably sell well, though coming from the author of The Seven Who Were Hanged it seems a mere trifle. The translator, Thomas Seltzer, should be urged to undertake the more worthy task of introducing Andreyev’s really great work to English-speaking readers.

New Men for Old, by Howard Vincent O’Brien. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] The first novel of a new young writer, especially when he is as sincere as Mr. O’Brien and as deeply interested in the joy of Work, is a matter of importance. The book has its obvious faults technically, even psychologically, but it preaches socialism from an interesting standpoint and makes good reading.

Challenge, by Louise Untermeyer. [The Century Co., New York.] Virile and ambitious songs of the present. Caliban in the Coal Mines, Any City, Strikers, In the Subway, The Heretic, show that the poet is not a shrinker from modern life. The title poem sounds the keynote:

John Ward, M.D., by Charles Vale. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Seneschal sentimentality with a “modern” plot woven about the questionable science of eugenics. One of those irritating books in which one reads page after page after page in the vain endeavor to find out why Mitchell Kennerly spent his money on it.

Forum Stories, selected by Charles Vale. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] All these stories have appeared in The Forum since it came under Mr. Kennerley’s management, and they are all by American writers. They represent the work not only of such well known writers as Reginald Wright Kauffman, James Hopper, Margaret Widdemer, and John S. Reed—who has a tense little narrative of the struggle toward land of two swimmers wrecked in the Pacific Ocean—but the work of several lesser known but promising authors. Among them is Miss Florence Kiper, of Chicago, who writes under the title I Have Borne My Lord a Son a most penetrating study of the psychology of motherhood. Papa, by ZoË Akins. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A little play which shows so much determination to be clever and very, very naughty that it’s almost a pity it doesn’t succeed.

Saint Louis: a Civic Masque, by Percy MacKaye. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.] A valuable contribution to the dramatic “spirit” of awakening civic intelligence.

Great Days, by Frank Harris. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Audacious, vivid, gripping sex experiences of the son of an immoral English innkeeper. The big rough brother of Three Weeks.

Poems, by Walter Conrad Amberg. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.] Poems written with a sure and gentle delicacy that seems forgotten by this generation of rude iconoclasts.

The True Adventures of a Play, by Louis Evan Shipman. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] The play is D’Arcy of the Guards and its author tells in full the trials and tribulations—and the eventual triumph—which met him from the moment when he offered to submit the manuscript to E. H. Sothern, and that star told him to send it along. Not only are the details of acceptances of plays, the incidental negotiations and red tape described, but the making of costume plates, the designing of the whole presentation, and the collaboration between author, producer, and actors are told with such humor and documentary fidelity to the actual transactions that the book will not only be interesting to the general reader but indispensable to the tyro playwright.

Nova Hibernia, by Michael Monahan. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Competent, incisive studies, sketches, and lectures dealing with “Irish poets and dramatists of today and yesterday”—Yeats, Synge, Thomas Moore, Mangan, Gerald Griffin, Callahan, Doctor Maginn, Father Prout, Sheridan, and others.

The Pipes of Clovis, by Grace Duffie Boylan. [Little, Brown, and Company, Boston.] A forester’s son proficient on a magic pipe; a blue and silver-gowned princess; the invasion of Swabia by the Huns away back in the twelfth century, all woven into a romance for children and grown-ups who still love the fairies.

The Post Office, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] A touching little idyll of a sick child who longs for a letter from the king through the post office which he can see across the road. And his dream comes true. Written in rhythmic prose.

Sanctuary, by Percy MacKaye. [Frederick A. Stokes, New York.] A bird masque performed in September, 1913, for the dedication of the bird sanctuary of the Meriden Bird Club at Meriden, N. H. A defense of birds and a defense of poetry. The theme is the conversion of a bird slaughterer. The verse is full of “birdblithesomeness.”

Old World Memories, by Edward Lowe Temple. [The Page Company, Boston.] The story of a summer vacation in Europe as naÏve, as full of human interest, disjoined history, and worthy indefinite advice as the after dinner “post card tour” of a just-returned Cook’s traveler.