Recent Fiction

ANY NUMBER CAN PLAY—Edward Harris Heth—Harper ($2.50). This taut tale of what happened one night in big-time Charley King's midwestern gambling house will give ordinary bridge and poker fans a rough notion of the fever that throbs in a sure-enough gambler's veins. Of that momentous night when Charley had his triumph—and his comeuppance—Wisconsin-born Author Heth has made a fast-moving short novel. His slightly lopsided characters look startlingly real in the smoky, harshly lit room where little Bergson sweats over, a two-bit bet and a stranger's trembling hands stake $8000 on one roll of the dice.

DAYS AND NIGHTS—Konsfanfine Simonov—Simon &Schuster ($2.75). One of the most ubiquitous young writers of the Russian war was 30-year old Konstantine Simonov. A crack Soviet war correspondent who generally turned up in the thickest fighting from Odessa to Leningrad, Reporter Simonov is also a successful playwright, poet, short-story writer, novelist. Days and Nights, his novel of the 1942 defense of Stalingrad, is more effective than most contemporary Soviet fiction because the Communist drum-beating is more muffled.

For 70 terrible days & nights, heroic Captain Saburov fought and led his men through the death-soaked shambles of the broken city, where advances were measured by paving stones and victories by buildings. Saburov managed to fall in love with an equally heroic young nurse and to strangle a Nazi spy with one hand while buried up to his neck in the rubble of a brick wall. But Days and Nights is neither a love story nor a routine bang-bang adventure yarn. Its high emotional charge is due to Author Simonov's sensitive observation of the people who fought in Stalingrad's streets. Russians have already bought 400,000 copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club has selected Joseph Barnes's smooth translation for November.

TRIAL BALANCE—William March—Harcourt, Brace ($3.50). William Edward March Campbell worked his way up from $25-a-week stenographer to vice president of a steamship company. During a long illness, he started writing short stories under the pen name of William March. At 44 (in 1938) he quit business to give his full time to writing. Author of two successful novels (Company K, The Tallons), March still specializes in short stories, which have appeared in almost every kind of U.S. magazine from The Yale Review to Esquire. In Trial Balance, Storyteller March has selected 55 of his best: short, sharp, craftsmanlike tales, most of them about neurotic people.