Recent Books: FICTION

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MISS SUSIE SLAGLE'S — Augusta Tucker — Harper ($2.50). A first novel of life among medical students at Johns Hopkins, 1912-1916, written with honest knowledge of the place and a brand of sentiment exactly suggestive of the time. Typical of Author Tucker's reverent gusto: a scene in which a young student at an autopsy is struck by the glowing beauty of lungs and intestines.

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY — W. Somerset Maugham — Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Melodrama within melodrama, made credible by Maugham's professional slickness, Christmas Holiday describes the shattering Paris holiday of a safe-&-sane young Englishman. Shatterers are a strip-tease pick up, who tells him about her marriage to a man who murdered for sport; a boyhood friend who is grooming himself to head the OGPU of a future Communist England.

KITTY FOYLE — Christopher Morley —Lippincott ($2.50). Author Morley's 46th book is apparently a reaction against his cloying reputation for whimsy. Heroine is the kind of a girl things happen to, a wisecracking blurter who has an abortive affair with a Philadelphia socialite. At once too sophisticated and too crude, too literary and too "natural," her confessions are a departure from the old Morley Mellowness into a sort of Muley Naturalism.

SAM — John Selby — Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50). A picturesque, sentimental, occasionally tedious first novel which won the $1,000 prize money as U. S. entry in a cosmic contest called the All-Nations Prize Novel Competition ($15,000). The author, 39, is a syndicate book reviewer for the Associated Press. The hero is a fat, rugged-individualist newspaper publisher, the background obviously Kansas City.