THEATREW. Somerset Maugham Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).
When Somerset Maugham wrote his first novels in the late 1890s they were regarded as daringly modern. These books would seem primly old-fashioned now. Still up-to-date, still a jump ahead of his popular-magazine colleagues, Maugham's stories still give the agreeably shocking sensation of telling the candid, unconventional truth. An expertly professional author, with few illusions about the world he writes of, he concocts tales that often leave a depressing brown taste in the mouth but seldom bore the palate while they are being swallowed. His...
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