Some of the following names will be recognized from preceding years,
some of them are new: Blasco Ibáñez, W. Somerset Maugham, May
Sinclair, Mrs. Henry Dudeney, Mary Butts, Frank Swinnerton, Georges
Clemenceau, Johan Bojer, H. Söderberg, Seumas Macmanus, R. Sabatini,
Demetra Vaka, Achmed Abdullah, Rabindranath Tagore, A. Remizov, Konrad
Bercovici, Anzia Yezierska, and--daughter of an English mother and
Italian father who met in China, she herself having been born in San
Francisco--Adriana Spadoni. Nor do these represent all the nations
whose sons and daughters practise the one indigenous American art on
its native soil. Let the list stand, without completion, sufficient to
the point.

The note of democracy is sounded, as a sequence, in the subject
matter. East Side Italian and Jew brush shoulders in Miss Spadoni's
tales; Englishman, Dane, and South Sea Islander shake hands on the
same page of W. Somerset Maugham's "The Trembling of a Leaf";
Norwegian, Frenchman, and Spaniard are among us, as before;
Bercovici's gypsies from the Roumanian Danube, now collected in
"Ghitza," flash colourful and foreign from the Dobrudja Mountains and
the Black Sea. In one remarkable piece of melodrama, "Rra Boloi," by
the Englishman Crosbie Garstin (_Adventure_), and the African witch
doctor of the Chwene Kopjes enters short-story literature.

The Oriental had been exploited to what appeared the ultimate; but
continued interest in the Eastern problem brings tidal waves of
Japanese and Chinese stories. Disarmament Conferences may or may not
effect the ideal envisioned by the Victorian, a time "when the war
drums throb no longer, and the battle-flags are furled in the
Parliament of Man"; but the short story follows the gleam, merely by
virtue of authorship and by reflecting the peoples of the earth.