Books: The Editors Like

Fiction from Abroad

A SEASON IN ENGLANDby P.H. Newby. (Knopf, $3.00.) A delightful tale, humorous and tender, in which the old theme of misunderstanding between parents and son is treated with none of the customary anger and self-pity. Newby is one of the most agreeably gifted of the new English writers.

SHORT NOVELS OF COLETTE. (Dial, $5.00.) Six novelettes pinpointed on love and fleshly passion by the grand old lady of French letters. “There is no one now in France,” Mr. Maugham has said, “who writes more admirably than Colette.”

THE BRIGANDby Giuseppe Berto. (New Directions, $2.75.). This stirring Italian novel, full of drama and alive with compassion for human suffering, is the story of an ex-soldier who tries to help the peasants of his village and brings them tragedy.

Americana

INCREDIBLE NEW YORKby Lloyd Morris. (Random House, $5.Oil.) High life and Low life in the Big City through the last hundred years. A gracefully written, entertaining history that splendidly captures the excitement of the world’s greatest metropolis.

THE ERA OF GOOD FEELINGSby George Dangerfield. (Harcourt, Brace, $6.00.) The author chronicles the era whose hinge was the presidency of James Monroe — an era of significant change in which America moved from the Jeffersonian to the Jacksonian philosophy of government.

A TREASURY OF WESTERN FOLKLORE edited by B. A. Botkin. (Crown, $4.00.) There is a wealth of salty reading in this varied collection of grass-roots yarns, pioneer legends, tall tales, songs and ballads — the folklore of that part of America, where the frontier era is still a living memory.

The Better Mysteries

THE PAPER THUNDERBOLT by Michael Innes.

(Dodd, Mead, $3.00.) A slow starter, this yarn blossoms happily into turbulence, winding up with a smashing climax in the deep dark innards of the Bodleian Library. Certain fantastic elements are made perfectly palatable by Innes’s urbane and silky style, and atmosphere and character drawing can only be called superb.

VENOM HOUSE by Arthur Upfield. (Doubleday, $2.50.) The insidious charms of Napoleon Bonaparte, half-caste detective, have a tendency to overshadow the crimes he so perceptively solves. On this occasion the highly charged personalities living in an Australian manor house call forth Bony’s most exuberant talents.

DEATH HAS DEEP ROOTS by Michael Gilbert.

(Harper, $2.50.) Another admirable performance by an increasingly impressive English author, in which a Frenchwoman on trial for murder in London is saved by the clever footwork of her lawyer.

SHOOT TO KILL by Wade Miller. (Farrar, Straus & Young, $2.50.) Max Thursday, San Diego private eye, morosely sets out to save the neck of the man for whom his girl has jilted him. This is that rarity, a tough whodunit which is perfectly credible, adult, and even poignant.