"The full revelation of inexhaustible wealth of native American material ... will come to the Eastern reader with the reading of "Zury" ... It is as native to Illinois as Tolstoi's "Anna Karenina" and Torguenieff's "Father and Sons" are to Russia, its descriptions are so infused with real emotion and so graphic. The book is absolutely unconventional ... not a trace of the old-world literature or society,--and every character is new and native ... The heroine is a Boston girl, ... a bouncing, resolute, and very frank personage, able to care for herself in any place. The central figure ... is Zury.... This a great and consistent piece of character painting.... He fills the book with his presence and his inimitable comments upon life and society.... A man whose better nature flowered late." "The McVeys; An Episode," has the sincerity of history, and when one reads it he is in the very atmosphere of Spring County. The surveying crew, the railroad building and final jubilee, the lead mining all go on under the eye.... The story of Anne and her children forms the connecting thread of a book of great power and freshness. The War novel won the first prize ($1,600) in the famous competition got up by the Detroit Free Press. In gaining favorable notices it quite equalled its two predecessors. "The Captain of Company K." There is nothing in the nature of artistic writing within the covers of "The Captain of Company K," by Maj. Joseph Kirkland, nor is there any of that kind called real because it is ugly, but there is a good story of life in a volunteer company in active service. The hero is a fine specimen of those countless citizens to whom their country's need revealed their best selves, and the heroine is an admirable likeness of the girls of her time. The publishers compare the story to the work of Tolstoi and De Maupassant, which is unjust to the author, whose mind is as free from Russian morbidity as it is of French artistic instinct, and, being an American, he is to be congratulated on both deficiencies. It is not the most truthful writers, or the authors of the most wholesome books who are carried away by the influence of contemporary foreigners, any more than it is the manliest men who imitate the social caprices of other countries. Maj. Kirkland has written an American story for Americans, and has written it well.--_Boston Herald._