Pedigree

THE SHORT STORY'S MUTATIONS-- Frances Newman--Heubsch ($2.50). Since the short story has come to its present perfection of form recently and, to all appearances, at a single bound, its derogators have declared that it is an art without .ancestry. It came into-the world, they said, by springing in full evening dress from the forehead of Guy de Maupassant-- a birth none the less illegitimate for being miraculous. Its present vigor is no more than the usual embarrassing precocity of the natural born.

These critical deriders, Miss Newman, in a brilliant volume that is at once an anthology and a book of criticism, disproves. She writes the short story's pedigree. She arranges in a line short stories selected from Petronius, Boccaccio, Voltaire, Hans Christian and Sherwood Anderson, Merimee, De Maupassant, Chekov, James Joyce, Henry James, Jules Laforgue, Paul Morand. Before each story is a brief critical preface describing the influences that shaped each writer, the influences that each set in motion, the significance of each in the line of heroic descent.