Half-Told Tales, by Henry Van Dyke (small HC, 1925, $3, which is 1/3 the internet price)
I love finding out stuff about people. This time Wikipedia didn't do the author justice. Van Dyke was a naturalist, author, poet, scholar (of Lord Tennyson), a preacher, a teacher and a diplomat. He chaired the committee that wrote the first printed Presbyterian liturgy. He was a long-time preacher at NYC's Brick Presbyterian Church. He was even named an ambassador of the Netherlands in 1913. If his close friend, President Wilson, thought he was doing his friend a favor, they both soon learned he hadn't. World War I broke out, and huge numbers of Americans were stuck in Europe. They all wanted to get home. Most hoped to reach the Netherlands, the only safe place for them. So poor Van Dyke, a newly appointed ambassador, soon had hundreds of American refugees camped on his doorstep wanting to get the heck out of Europe. He is reported to have done a wonderful job, but after the war he had had enough drama and went back to America himself.
This is a book of tales "shorter than the shortest short-stories". The idea was not to just "reduce the size of the stories", but "to leave the insignificant things out of the picture altogether, and to give as much room to the significant things as might suffice to make them clear... This way of writing does not aim at popularity or praise... It grieves me to the heart to have to make a singular, and perhaps presumptuous, request of the readers of this book, if perchance it finds any. Will you kindly do a bit of thinking while you read? Otherwise these Half-Told Tales will mean nothing to you. The worth of a book depends on the reader as much as on the writer."
This preface is amazing. The stories are amazing, Look for this book on the new fiction section. Note, these are not stories for children. (L-HBf)
