Books: O'Brien's Last

THE BEST SHORT STORIES, 1941—Edited by Edward J. O'Brien—Houghton Mifflin ($2.75).

The common people must love short stories; they read so many of them. But the late Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien—who got out his first short-story anthology in 1915, and another every year thereafter—avoided as far as he could the short short stories which the common people read in popular magazines.

A poet, a critic, a tireless student of short fiction who never wrote a short story himself, O'Brien died in February, aged 50, at his home in Buckinghamshire, England. Thus The Best Short Stories, 1941 is his last anthology. The series will...