Stories in Dialogue Available to Purchase

AS the state of the world grows more depressing, I find that my taste in literature becomes lighter. I have developed a nervous horror of being bored, as well as a feverish anxiety to be distracted, and so I now subject my fiction to a pre‐reading test. When I am about to choose a novel, I first turn over the pages to see if there is plenty of dialogue and not too many long paragraphs of descriptive matter; once this peculiar criterion of mine is satisfied, I begin reading and if the dialogue is not “literary talk” but is true to life, amusing and character revealing, I then decide to buy, borrow or hire the book.