Khurram Wadee ✅Time for a new #BookAtBedtime. So, tonight I will be staring #OfMiceAndMen by #JohnSteinbeck.
Jonathan EmmesediDawn Powell
>> "New Yorker" ... film critic Richard Brody became the latest media figure to celebrate Powell, declaring her nine novels written from 1929 to 1948 (including three about Ohio) “one of the most extraordinary outpourings of sustained literary artistry that the United States can boast.” <<
#Books #DawnPowell #USLiterature #AmericanLiterature #20thCenturyLiterature #NewYork #Ohio
Earlier this evening I enjoyed the satisfaction of coming to the end of a book I enjoyed very much, Dawn Powell's 1948 novel "The Locusts Have No King".
I've posted about this author before; this is the fifth novel of hers I have read, and it impressed me as possibly the best so far. Beneath the sharp observation of literary New York and mid-century Manhattan mores lies a tale full of insight about the relations between men and women. The author provides plenty of amused skepticism about what we tell ourselves and others about our motives and hopes in the ups and downs of love and friendship, but this skepticism never lapses into a shallow cynicism about human nature. Instead, as happens with a comedy at its best, we are left both amused and moved.
Andrew Wheeler had a slightly different but thoughtful take on the book here:
https://antickmusings.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-locusts-have-no-king-by-dawn-powell.html
As Wheeler notes, "The Locusts Have No King" is not a book for everyone; you must have a taste for adult satire that is never coarse but which can sting at times. If you are, or aspire to be, that adult, I would strongly recommend that you hurry along to your library or bookshop now!
#Books #DawnPowell #TheLocustsHaveNoKing #Fiction #Novels #AmericanLiterature #USLiterature #NewYork #LiteratureInEnglish #1940s
https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/solstice/
Usually classified as memoir, Joanne Lozar Glenn's "Solstice" could also be appreciated as short fiction.
In any case, it's an affecting piece of writing that takes minutes to read but will stay with you for days, weeks, months...
Image: Joanne Lozar Glenn -- https://muffin.wow-womenonwriting.com
#USLiterature #Nonfiction #Memoir #Solstice #JoanneLozarGlenn
One of my greatest pleasures recently has been discovering the writing of Dawn Powell.
I've just finished her 1942 novel "A Time To Be Born", which combines both her first hand understanding of the journalistic and literary New York of her time with a midwesterner's skeptical amusement at metropolitan self advancement and snobbery.
The novel also provides insights into American women's distinctive struggles with ambition, competition, and love in the opening years of the Second World War.
#Books #Fiction #DawnPowell #USLiterature #20thCenturyLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #Novel
https://marissavivian.substack.com/p/hidden-voices-004-dawn-powell
James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" impressed me both for its exploration of love, sex, and sexual identity and for the skill with which the author has the narrative unfold; I was gripped from beginning to end.
Although the protagonist is white, I know that some critics believe that the theme of race is obliquely present by virtue of the salience of various kinds of minority identity throughout the novel.
Quite aside from it being a "good read", I would recommend it to anybody interested in the literary treatment of bisexuality.
Expatriation also figures as an important theme. These words hit home with this migrant:
>> You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back. <<
"Home", of course, can be more than a geographical location.
#Books #GiovannisRoom #JamesBaldwin #Fiction #AmericanLiterature #USLiterature #AfricanAmericanLiterature #QueerFiction #LiteratureInEnglish #Sexuality #Bisexuality #20thCenturyLiterature #1950s #Homosexuality #Gay #Expatriates #Migrants
I read some of Baldwin's essays a while ago, but I'm a mite embarrassed to say that I have only just finished my first Baldwin novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain".
Did I love it? No.
Did I admire it? Yes, there is some powerful writing there. I was particularly impressed by Baldwin';s ability to encompass both African American vernacular and elevated biblical cadences without ever descending into hokiness. The psychological insight and narrative organization shown in the account of Esther's liaison with Gabriel struck me as brilliant.
The book also interested me as a document of midcentury US culture -- a social history approach that I'm sure Baldwin would have despised as reductive and unliterary!
I wonder if I might enjoy "Giovanni's Room" more, in part because I want to explore sexual rather than spiritual identity.
Image: James Baldwin at the Albert Memorial in 1969 -- Allen Warren -- Wikimedia Commons -- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#Literature #JamesBaldwin #USLiterature #AfricanAmericanLiterature #Books #Fiction #Novel
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/01/in-the-aftermath-of-victory-vince-passaro/
Cowley " would be involved with just about everything and everybody of literary consequence during those years. That is not hyperbole; a list would include Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Cheever, as well as John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Eugene O’Neill, E. E. Cummings, Ken Kesey, Thornton Wilder, Edmund Wilson, Archibald MacLeish, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, James T. Farrell, Alexander Calder, Dwight Macdonald, Dawn Powell, John Updike, Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Van Wyck Brooks, Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, Dorothy Day, Mike Gold, Robert Penn Warren, John Berryman, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty."
#USLiterature #AmericanLiterature #MalcolmCowley #GeraldHoward #TheInsider #20thCenturyLiterature #Books
What a delight it was to read Dawn Powell's 1936 "Turn, Magic Wheel", in which urbane literary satire intertwines with an acute account of the deceptions and self-deceptions of love and marriage!
I found Powell's wit and style especially refreshing after having recently waded through the self important verbosity of Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel".
#Books #DawnPowell #TurnMagicWheel #AmericanLiterature #USLiterature #Novel #Satire #NewYorkLiterature ##20thCenturyLiterature #Thirties #1930s
Thomas Wolfe -- Look Homeward, Angel
It's not often that I have to take a break from a book, but I needed three days off from page after page of purple prose about people neither pleasant nor entertaining nor interesting.
Wolfe's 1929 Bildungsroman, a coming of age in North Carolina novel, was once thought to put Wolfe on a level with Hemingway or Faulkner.
Not many critics would hold him in such esteem today; I believe this revaluation is well deserved. Wolfe never used one word when he could cram in ten, preferably with much "poetic" diction and overuse of alliteration. Not every writer has to write the stripped down prose of Hemingway, not every darling has to be murdered, but an editorial slaughter would have been welcome here.* Wolfe also lacks the insight and imagination exercised by Faulkner with regard to race in the South.
Getting to the last of the 500 plus pages of wordy self indulgence this afternoon felt like the end of an ordeal.
Am I being unfair? Wolfe is sometimes described as an author best appreciated by young men. I admit that I might well have been impressed had I read him as an adolescent; I'm glad I did not, as the book might have done irreparable damage to my prose style.
#Books #ThomasWolfe #LookHomewardAngel #USLiterature #AmericanLiterature #20thCenturyLiterature #NorthCarolina #Bildungsroman
