BORROWED SUMMER and Other Stories

Net the quality in writing of say New Yorker level, but in theme and tenor, distinctly superior to the run-of-the-mill ladies' magazines (though a few of them appeared in Cosmo and Good Housekeeping). These are stories of human nature, often in its less attractive variants, quietly portrayed. There is the city clerk's small embesslement which gives him a summer on a farm to remember; there's a palm reader's revenge on the female species generally; a hurricane; a bedbound old woman; a colored child's first lesson in prejudice; a haunted house; and so on, modestly, capably handled. But one questions whether these are sufficiently distinguished or distinctive to override the lack of general popularity of the genus short stories in book form.