A Book, published in 1923, is a collection of twelve stories, three one-act plays, eleven poems, and a half-dozen pencil portraits…. A Night Among the Horses and Other Stories (1929) is a reprint of A Book with the addition of three stories….

All of the material in A Book reflects the American milieu, and the stories added to A Night are presented against a European background. This change reflects Miss Barnes's nineyears' residence in Europe prior to the 1929 publication of A Night Among the Horses; and this circumstance is of more than biographical importance since setting matters a great deal in Barnes's work. The characters in A Book are frequently immigrants to America, and even those who are not have names suggestive of their European origins Many are Russians; some are a mixture of Jewish and European strains. They have heavily ethnic names…. (p. 22)

These names reveal something of the...