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Author. Educated in his native Rumania, Konrad Bercovici entered the U. S. in 1916 with his Rumanian wife. Soon his stories of gypsy life were appearing in The Pictorial Review, the Century, Harper's and other magazines. His name became a familiar one in the columns of The Nation, The New Republic, The Masses, and The Liberator, where he wrote on sociological questions from the vantage of an educated man, an immigrant to one of the most complex and multicolored cities on earth—New York. The completeness with which he assimilated the flavors, forces and antecedents of his new surroundings testifies to his large capacity for social feeling. Besides The Marriage Guest, Author Bercovici has just published an autobiographical work, On New Shores.
-THE MARRIAGE GUEST—Konrad Bercovici —Boni & Liveright ($2.00).
God's Wisdom
PASSION AND GLORY — William Cummings—Knopf ($2.50). Lens, a young Norwegian in a New England fishing town, is frustrate, since his dumb passion has been denied by the woman he loves and harlots do not satisfy him. So he turns with a mystical simplicity to God. God gives Lens passion to win the woman he loves. But there is no glory; their son dies at birth. The sins of the fathers. . . . After a few years she dies, too, and then there is neither passion nor glory for Lens. At last he stumbles upon glory, finding that he has a son of his own flesh. He who has gone dumbly feeling through life concludes: "God's wisdom is stronger than all the foolishness of the world."
Primitive Passions
RUN SHEEP RUN—Thames Wil- liamson—Small, Maynard ($2.50). "Ba-a-a-a-a" bleat 2,000 "woollies" as they start forward harried by the sheep-dog at their flanks. A sheepherder, strong in suffering hardship, powerful in emotion, childish in mind, is alone for a whole summer, far in the California mountains with his sheep. He grows wilderness-mad. His only civilized emotion is a strange attachment to his herd. All summer long he makes only three acquaintances—a cougar, a prospector and the prospector's daughter. Successively, in unreasoning passion, he kills the first two and takes the last for his mate. The power of the book, the excuse for it, is that the author, once a sheepherder, treats the protagonist as he treats the beasts in the story, as a dumb brute suffering without understanding. It is not a comedy, and unlike the Scandinavian treatment of such a theme it is not stark tragedy. It is simply a wild-animal tale, effectively told.
Best
THE BEST PLAYS OF 1924-1925— Burns Mantle, Editor—Small, Maynard ($3.00). Of the 201 new plays which appeared on the Manhattan stage last season, Critic Mantle has selected ten for his Year Book, and he points with pride to the fact that his selection for the first time (although he has made a similar one for the past five years) is composed entirely of plays by American authors.
What Price Glory, They Knew What They Wanted, Desire Under the Elms, The Firebrand, Dancing Mothers, Mrs. Partridge Presents, The Fall Guy, The Youngest, Minick, Wild Birds—these ten plays in slightly condensed form make up the bulk of the volume.