FICTION: New Publishers

THE MUSIC FROM BEHIND THE MOON—James Branch Cabell—The John Day Co. ($6). Of good publishing there cannot be too much, and the present volume introduces a new house under an old name.* Chief among the tokens that this will be a house of distinction is its announcement that its public offerings will not be swaddled, as is the current fashion, in soft bales of superlative adjectives and the ejaculations of self-advertising pre-reviewers. The election of Mr. Cabell as first to bear the new John Day insignium, in a limited edition (3,000 copies), is evidence that the publishers intend kindly towards fine writing, and the book's artistic execution intimates that the houses of Brentano, Knopf, Boni & Liveright, the Viking Press, A. & C. Boni, Houghton Mifflin and their peers are to have company in their pursuit of fine printing.

In itself, Mr. Cabell's small book is but a melodious recapitulation of a poet's life of malaise. The tale is of Madoc, a singer in the Kingdom of Netan, whose music pleased all but himself, he having heard the sweet, elusive skirling of

Ettarre, whose instrument was her heartstrings and whose home was the waste behind the moon. By dint of a cunning decimal point, Madoc abbreviated her exile in that place, confounding the Norns, as he thought, and establishing his happiness. Then it is shown how, having attained the unattainable, his life lacked savor still, until Ettarre died, a grey wife and mother, leaving Madoc with memories once more elusive and indispensable.