Brief Reviews

“The Game as It Is Played”: Essays on Theodore Dreiser. By Donald Pizer. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. 224 pp. Cloth, $85.95. This collection brings together some of Donald Pizer’s finest essays on Dreiser in a volume as concise as it is comprehensive. These essays represent an impressive range of Pizer’s studies from the aesthetics of Dreiser’s naturalism to his politics and prejudices. “The Game as It Is Played” collects over forty years’ worth of scholarship by one of Dreiser’s most important authorities and constitutes an essential compilation for Dreiser studies. (VMB)

Stephen Crane. The Red Badge of Courage. Ed. James Nagel. Broadview Press, 2014. 208 pp. Paper, $12.95; ebook, $8.95. An excellent and authoritative classroom edition, with appendices that include the deleted chapter 12, contemporary reviews, and Crane’s sequel “The Veteran.” (GS)

Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart, historical essay by David Porter, explanatory notes by Kari A. Ronning and Porter, textual essay and editing by Frederick M. Link and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2015. 552 pp. Cloth, $90.00. A splendid edition of a neglected Cather novel approved by the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions. Porter’s historical essay and Link and Ronning’s textual essay are models of their kind. (GS)

Harold Frederic, The Martyr of Maev and Other Irish Stories, ed. Jack Morgan. Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. of American Press, 2015. 200 pp. Paper, $22.50. This compilation of six neglected Frederic stories should prove to be a handy classroom edition in the event teachers of American literary realism want to assign more of Frederic’s fiction than The Damnation of Theron Ware. Otherwise, there would seem to be scant market for it. (GS)