_Home Fires in France_, by _Dorothy Canfield_ (Henry Holt & Company). Here is a homely record of the new spirit that the war has developed in the homes of France, and of the human intercourse so rapidly cemented between the French people and ourselves. There is a quiet glow in these stories which idealizes the sufferings of France, and brings home to us poignantly the present realities of her sufferings. If the volume lacks the conscious art of “Hillsboro People,” its substance has been shaped by a personal experience so intense that the book should live as a memorial long after the incidents which it records have passed. _Rush-Light Stories_, by _Maud Chapin_ (Duffield & Company). These poetic studies in place, though reminiscent of Gautier, are freshly told in a style that adequately mirrors the backgrounds of which they treat. I find them to be delicately wrought, with a prismatic beauty of phrasing, which errs slightly on the side of preciosity. _The Thunders of Silence_, by _Irvin S. Cobb_ (George H. Doran Company). When this short story appeared in the Saturday Evening Post this year, it was discussed widely as a polemic. It is not literature, but it is journalism at its very best, and has fine story values. _Free and Other Stories_, by _Theodore Dreiser_ (Boni & Liveright). This collection of stories is uneven, but the best of it is the best of Mr. Dreiser. In “The Lost Phœbe,” which I reprinted as one of the best short stories of 1917, a new legend was added to American letters which had much of the glamor of leisureliness of Hawthorne. Such a story as “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” is a fine imaginative projection into a new world, mirroring ironically our human passions in the warfare of two tribes of ants under the blades of a grass forest. Of the social studies in this volume, all show the exact observation and conscientious accumulation of detail for which Mr. Dreiser is noted, and the absence of selective power in many cases which often weakens his best work. _Battles Royal Down North_ and _Harbor Tales Down North_, by _Norman Duncan_ (Fleming H. Revell Company). These two collections contain the last stories which we shall have from the pen of Norman Duncan. Reverting as they do to the Labrador shores of which he is the chief interpreter, they show no flagging in Mr. Duncan’s power. No other writer has portrayed so vividly the wet gray shores of the Labrador, nor interpreted so sympathetically the character of the Labrador “Liveyere.” Such a story as “The Little Nipper o’ Hide-an’-Seek Harbor” has not been surpassed by Mr. Duncan in his earlier books, and as one who knows the Labrador personally, I can testify to the reality and imaginative truth of Mr. Duncan’s epic chronicles.