FOURTEEN STORIES

This is a selection from the stories Pearl Buck has written from 1943 to the present,- ten have appeared in magazines, four have not been published. On the whole, the collection is a fine one, showing a variety of plots, settings and characters. Several dealing with family situations will be particularly appealing to the general short story market. The husband and wife relationships are eminently recognizable-there's an excellent balance of faintly nostalgic sentiment and sharp, occasionally even acid, realism. The tales with an Oriental setting reveal an awareness of the Oriental psychology rare in an Occidental- a faculty Mrs. Buck has shown in her early books. But here the issues are frequently involved in the conflict between Eastern and Western civilizations. Homeless and rootless children provide another recurrent feature. Two or three short shorts seem more like allegories and parables and strike another note. The stories of imminent marriage handle in different ways the uncertainties that almost everyone feels at that moment, but which rarely are recognized by writers. A collection which will for many show a different side of this well-known novelist.