Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion.

THE LONE WOLF RETURNS--Louis Joseph Vance--Dutton ($2.00).Michael Lanyard, super-gentleman and super-crook, has faultless evening clothes unruffled by a life of practically continuous crime. Opera-hat in one hand, revolver in the other, spurred on, as the jacket says, by the love of a good woman, he wages horrendous warfare for 367 pages against the underworld henchmen of the bootlegger King of New York. Needless to say the finale finds him triumphant.

THE CELESTIAL OMNIBUS--E. M. Forster--Knopf ($2.00). Six strange and beautifully written stories by an author whom literary cognoscenti have for some time appraised as one of the most distinctive of modern English writers. A would-be picnic in the chestnut-woods above the Italian village of Ravello results surprisingly in a 14-year-old English boy's encounter with Pan himself-- to his great delight and the utter horror of all his relatives and friends. Another youngster discovers that a certain blind alley in London is the stopping-place for a line of celestial omnibuses, conducted by such defunct immortals as Shelley, Dante and Sir Thomas Browne. A curate meets a Faun. A very worthy man attempt- ing to bring up his young fiancee by hand is aghast to see her escape from respectability into that other kingdom where the dryads of the Greeks still live and are happy. An eerie beauty quickens these six brief tales.

CAPTURES -- John Galsworthy-- Scribner ($2.00). Sixteen short stories, well above the average. In Late--299, the tale of an ex-convict who refused to be pitied, Mr. Galsworthy again displays his hatred of the prison system already attacked in Justice. Had a Horse is an amusing sketch of an English bookie who, after years of making a quietly shady living by betting on horses he never saw, comes by accident into the ownership of a real race horse, and blown with pride of possession, deliberately does himself out of a considerable bit of dishonest money for the pleasure of seeing his horse win. A Hedonist etches the collapse of a would-be laughing satyr whose avoirdupois is too much for his intentions. A Feud deals with unnecessary hatred and the wreckage it makes.