HAIRCUT & OTHER STORIES by Ring...

HAIRCUT & OTHER STORIES by Ring Lardner (Collier: $9.95). Ring Lardner’s work seems overdue for a revived interest and reevaluation: During the ‘20s, he counted F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and H. L. Mencken among his fans. Lardner had an exceptional gift for capturing the rhythms of everyday speech and writing, and his tartly ironic prose retains its savor, 70 years later. The cynical portraits of hypocritical big shots in “The Love Nest” and “A Day With Conrad Green” may seem cliched today, but the ruefully jaded vision of love in his comic stories recalls the biting wit of Dorothy Parker. In “I Can’t Breathe,” a hilariously self- absorbed flapper finds she’s become engaged to four different men, but can’t quite summon the nerve to tell any of them about the others. The gabby nurse in “Zone of Quiet” blithely confides to a bed-ridden man that all her recent patients have died: “So when I went off duty I told Miss Halsey to be nice to him, like I was going to tell her about you. And when I came back in the morning he was dead. Isn’t that funny?”