PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21976, 10 June 1933, Page 4

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

The June number of Home, which describes itself as “the Australian journal of quality,” is to hand. As an artistic production it occupies a class of itg own from the excellence of the portraiture that is given in its pages, and the letterpress is of an original and racy type. A complete story by Margaret’Kennedy is the feature of the -May issue of the Strand Magazine to which prominence is chiefly given, but this magazine always avails itself of the services of fictionwriters of repute, and on this occasion Gilbert Frankau, Roland - Pertwee, W. B. Maxwell, and “ Sapper ” are among its contributors. G. K. Chesterton supplies a whimsical article on “The Detection Club,” and an attractively illustrated article is descriptive. of the manner in which camera-pictures .of • birds are obtained. The contents of Chambers’s Journal for May are not less varied than is usually the case with this old-established, somewhat conservative, and still popular monthly. They range from a description of the way in which wild animals are caught for/the Zoological Gardens in London to an account of the naval action off the Dogger Bank in 1915, from a dissertation on the importance of the vitamins to an explanation of the value of air as a material in industry, .and the demand of the magazine-reader for fiction is not neglected. Pearson’s Magazine for April (per Messrs Gordon and Gotch) preserves a judicious balance between fiction and articles of general interest, while a pleasant vein of humour is also provided.

A Return to “ Horrorism Writing in the Spectator, Miss Rose Macaulay claims to have discovered a definite trend towards “horrorism” in fiction; —“ What does seem certain is that, for good or ill, our literature is swinging back to an oldworld robustness, and it will, one presumes, train up a reading public to suit it. At the end of a not-so-long road one sees the figure of the Noble Savage, tomahawk in hand, fierce in deed as in word, waiting to conduct to its ultimate doom a civilisation grown too effeminate and nice. Or is it, perhaps, all part of the scope of art to weave the horrid pattern of this horrid life of burs down to the last most horrid stitch; and is the Noble Savage a Savage Messiah, a guide to a greater civilisation than is yet ours, in which nothing that is will seem horrid, in which we shall look on blood and dirt both in life and art with a calm, deodorising gaze? Wandering Novelist An announcement of a new novel, “Mrs Van Kleek,” to come from Mrs Elinor Mordaunt, is followed by the news that the author is Mrs Mordaunt no longer—though, no doubt, she will keep that as a pen name (says a London writer). But Mrs Mordaunt, a little while ago, made a second marriage.: and is now Mrs Rawnsley Bowles, of Priors Mesne, Gloucestershire. Perhaps this means that Mrs Mordaunt (it is difficult to think of her otherwise) will now settle down and stay at home. Hitherto her friends have seldom been certain where to find her. A meeting in London would he followed by a postcard indicating that she was on her way to Peru, or the Andaman Islands, or perhaps on a visit to her son, coffee growing in Kenya. Never was there such a tireless traveller, or a writer of more human and readable travel books.