FINE SHORT STORIES

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 129, 2 June 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

FINE SHORT STORIES

By "After Such Pleasures." Dorothy Parker, the author of "Laments for the Living," will add to her already established reputation as a short story writer. The book is a collection of eleven short stories, the scenes being laid in New York throughout. None of the stories contains much action, while some are so slight as hardly to justify the title "story" at all, but might more correctly be called monologues or dialogues. One, for instance (not the most cheerful of the collection), is merely a record of the thoughts and emotions of a woman as she drives through the city where she formerly met her lover. Another is pure dialogue, being the conversation, without any description, of a young couple on a train between two stations, while a third, "Lady with a Lamp," is a record of the remarks of a tactless bedside visitor to the invalid whom she has to comfort. We have all met this type of person. Several of the stories deal with the comedy or tragedy (whichever way one looks at it) of 'intellectual emptiness, and with "nit-wits" who are incapable of appreciating the responsibiltics of life or of extracting any happiness from it. The stories in the main strike a somewhat melancholy note, but there is a quiet humour about most of them that compels a smile from the thoughtful reader, while one only, "Diary of a New York Lady" romps along in boisterous style.

Altogether the book is one which should not be missed; its stories or essays—call them what you will—are finished works of art, and leave behind a definite yet delicate flavour lingering after their perusal. One or two might well have been written by O. Henry. The book comes from Longmans, Green and Company.