#An Honest Thief, and Other Stories#, by _Fyodor Dostoevsky_; translated from the Russian by _Constance Garnett_ (The Macmillan Company). This is the eleventh volume in the first collected English edition of Dostoevsky's works. The great Russian novelist was not a consummate technician when he wrote short stories, but the massive epic sweep of his genius clothed the somewhat inorganic substance of his tales with a reality which is masterly in the title story, in "An Unpleasant Predicament," and in "Another Man's Wife." The volume includes among other stories "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," which, though little known, is the key to the philosophy of his greater novels. #Civilization#, 1914-1917, by _Georges Duhamel_; translated by _E. S. Brooks_ (The Century Co.). This volume shares with Élie Faure's "La Sainte Face" first place among the volumes of permanent literature produced in France during the war. With more subtle and restrained artistry than M. Barbusse, the author has portrayed the simple chronicles of many of his comrades. He employs only the plainest notation of speech, with an economy not unlike that of Maupassant, and the indictment is the more terrible because of this emphasis of understatement. Before the war, M. Duhamel was known as a competent and somewhat promising poet and dramatist, and he was one of the few to whom the war brought an ampler endowment rather than a numbing silence. #Czecho-Slovak Stories#, translation by _Ŝárka B. Hrbkova_ (Duffield and Company). I trust that this volume will prove a point of departure for a series of books each devoted to the work of a separate Czecho-Slovak master. Certainly the work of Jan Neruda, Svatopluk Čech, and Caroline SvĚtlá, to name no others, ranks with the best of the Russian masters, and the reader is compelled to speculate as to how many more equally fine writers remain unknown to him. For such stories as these can only come out of a long and conscious tradition of art, and the greater part of these stories are drawn from volumes published during the last half century. The volume contains an admirable historical and critical introduction, and adequate biographies and bibliographies of the authors included.