A collection of short stories pulsing with life. Its characters are all people we almost know; its incidents are all things we could almost swear we have passed through ourselves, or felt passing through those around us.

Samira Azzam's skill lies in her selection of these living characters whom we have known — these characters among whom we live and with whom we keep company.

As you read these stories you feel that Samira Azzam is sitting beside you, telling you the story or the tale; for her style is smooth, beautiful, simple, far from the affectation and artificiality that so often cause a story's splendor to be lost! In her stories the author knows what she wants to say, and she says it without beating about the bush. She has eyes that see what goes on around her, and she conveys the pictures in a way that makes you wonder how you never noticed them before, or how you passed them by without a second glance.

An artist who feels her surroundings and what happens in them, she draws for you real pictures and real incidents in an attractive frame that keeps you reading on, savoring that delicious atmosphere which pervades all the stories.

The story "The Newspaper Seller" is the best example of this! Have you not wondered at those boys forever crying out the news, waving the papers in their hands, leaping between the automobiles and the tramcars and the passers-by, always shouting in their motion that never rests? Have you not thought, as you watched them: how, I wonder, do they live?

Stories upon stories, all of them

delight and all of them pleasure. Some of them we had read before in certain newspapers and magazines. I could have wished that all the stories of this collection were new, never published before, so that we might enjoy the largest possible share of Samira Azzam's production.

Engaging stories — I could have wished them a more beautiful outward frame, for the book's cover falls short of artistic taste, and "Dar al-Ilm" has not accustomed us to this before. But then... what does the table matter, so long as the food upon it is delicious?!

• There recently appeared in Lebanon a collection of stories entitled "Just Before Sunset," from the pen of Miss Adele Srieddine. In her stories the author attempts to take up the subjects of the youth of the age, through her own observations and experiences.

The stories of "Just Before Sunset" amount to no more than the attempts of a budding writer, who appears to possess a measure of boldness for which she deserves congratulation.

"Antigone" and "Night Flight"

In an article which the well-known French critic André Rousseaux published on the mission of the "Arab Publications," he wrote that world culture does not fulfill the conditions of its diffusion unless it is carried over into the Arabic language. And in fact this house aims, first of all, at securing contact between Western thought and Arab thought through the translation of masterpieces. It has indeed set about achieving its aims, issuing in an elegant production "Tristan and Iseult,"

or the romance of the enchanted potion, by Joseph Bédier, rendered into the language of the dad by the born poet Mr. Youssef Ghsoub; after it it has issued the play "Antigone" by the famous writer Jean Anouilh, likewise in Ghsoub's translation, and the novel "Night Flight" by Saint-Exupéry, translated by the man of letters Mr. Jamil Jabr, who some months ago brought out the biography "Mayy in Her Turbulent Life."

The Arab Publications are distinguished — besides the original artistic drawings that adorn them — by a great fidelity to the original text, together with felicity of expression and regard for the spirit of the language. These masterpieces, which had so effective an influence in the West, lose scarcely anything of their value in translation; for the Parisian house, it appears, has sought commercial competition only by way of quality, in matter and in art.