Brief Reviews

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Ed. Richard W. Etulain. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2024. 236 pp. Paper, $16. 95; ebook, $9.99. An excellent new edition of Cather's classic 1927 novel set in New Mexico edited with an introduction and notes by the distinguished western historian and literary scholar Etulain and well-suited for adoption as a classroom text (GS)Edgar Lee Masters, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays: Annotated Edition. Ed. Jason Stacy et al. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2023. 234 pp. Paper, $22.50; ebook, $14.99. This gathering of thirteen polemical essays on such topics as the presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan and the Philippine-American War by the anti-imperialist, imperfect populist-progressive Masters, all originally published during the first years of the twentieth century, showcases a more hard-bitten component of his writing than modern readers associate with the poems about the rural Midwest in Spoon River Anthology (1915). (GS)Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses. Ed. Emily J. Orlando. Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2024. 290 pp. Paper, $39.95; ebook, $39,95. A significant new contribution to scholarship on Wharton's aesthetics that should in turn prompt renewed appraisals of her descriptions of home décor and spatial design in such works as Sanctuary (1903), Italian Villas (1904), and The House of Mirth (1905). (GS)