Long Stories

THE FLYING YORKSHIREMAN--Edited by Whit Burnett and Martha Foley--Harper ($2.50).

The "novella," say Editors Burnett and Foley, is a story whose development requires more length and leisure than the short story, and yet "is in the nature of the short story in its unity of effect." Last week they demonstrated some of the possibilities of the form in a collection of five "novellas" chosen from Story magazine, which they edit. Although the book was launched to the accompaniment of resounding praise by short-story experts, any one of whose superlatives could qualify as the blurb of the week, readers less attentive to the nuances of the art might have difficulty in seeing what the "novellas" gained by being three times as long as short stories. Said Novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher of one story: "As beautifully simple, fresh, lucid and moving a recreation of a childhood and its ending as I have ever read." Said Short-Story Anthologist Edward J. O'Brien: "The art form that Boccaccio invented is born again full-blown in America at last." Said Novelist Dan Wickenden: "We have been rolling about on the floor over The Flying Yorkshireman."

Less excitable readers found it easy to keep off the floor, catalogued The Flying Yorkshireman as consisting of: 1) a fantasy by Eric Knight about a man who discovered he could fly, amusing but stretched thin; 2) a sentimental story by Helen Hull about a dentist's wife who wins a $10,000 novel contest; 3) a realistic report on New Year's Eve in a flop house, by Albert Maltz; 4) a whimsy about a girl whose poetic sprightliness enchants a middle-aged doctor, by 24-year-old Rachel Maddux; 5) a sentimental reminiscence of childhood by I. J. Kapstein. Main trouble with "novellas" seemed to be that they added length but no depth.

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