SOURCE: A review of Fancy Goods; Open All Night: Stories, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. LII, No. I, January 1, 1984, p. 12.

In the following excerpt, the critic delivers a harsh assessment of Fancy Goods; Open All Night: Stories.

Written in 1921 and 1922 by French writer Morand (1888-1976), these sketches of Parisian flappers [in Fancy Goods; Open All Night: Stories] would hardly be a candidate for 1980s rediscovery—if it were not for the fact that they were translated by Ezra Pound; those translations never saw print back in the 1920s but were found in a trunk in Virginia in 1976. And it's not difficult to see why (financial reasons aside) these two groups of stories might have appealed to Pound—considering his interest in the condensation of linguistic imagery. (An example of Morand's prose: "No hollow whitewashed apple tree could avoid bending over water reflecting the clouds, weighted with a boat and...