Books: The Editors Like

FICTION

The Printer of Malgudi

BY R. K. NARAYAN (MICHIGAN STATE, $3.50)

An idealistic publisher becomes involved with the movie business, which is just as zany in India as anywhere else, and the whole entanglement gives the author scope for a peculiar and engaging effect which can only be described as serious horseplay.

Morning

BA JULIAN FANE (REYNAL, $3.50)

A small English boy’s reactions to the big country house where he is growing up, to the acutely characterized people around him, and to the passing of time make an attractive and graceful novel.

The Blue Cup and Other Stories

BY B. J. CHUTE (DUTTON, $3.50)

A collection of short stories by the author of Greenwillow, light, pleasant, undemanding fiction which is well turned of its type, believable and unforced.

HISTORY AND LITERATURE

Jeb Stuart

BY BURKE DAVIS (RINEHART, $6.00)

An orthodox, admiring biography of the ingenious Confederate general, most of it necessarily devoted to shot-by-shot accounts of campaigns, since Stuart didn’t live long enough to be anything but a cavalry fighter.

Easter Island

BY ALFRED MÉTRAUX (OXFORD, $5.00)

Annoyed by vague blatherings about mysterious Easter Island, the author has undertaken a careful study of the place, its inhabitants, and its history, and knocks the props out from under a lot of romantic guesswork.

Vanished Cities

BY HERMANN AND GEORE SCHREIBER (KNOPF, $5.75) The authors, lively scholars, gallop over so much historical and archaeological territory that the reader is frequently left gasping, but the book is good reading, thick with hints for further investigation.

Opus Posthumous

BY WALLACE STEVENS (KNOPF, $6.75)

Poems, plays, and prose, either unpublished or mislaid from the collected works, edited by Samuel French Morse, whose introduction carefully accounts for the previous history of most of the material in the book.

The Fine Art of Reading

BY LORD DAVID CECIL (BOBBS-MERRILL, $5.00)

Highly literate and perceptive essays on a number of writers, including Shakespeare, Ford, Jane Austen, and Conrad, among others. It is a great pity that tangled pronouns and dangling participles have been allowed to disfigure otherwise elegant prose.