DAWN POWELL

Set against an atmospheric backdrop of New York City in the months just before America''s entry into World War II, A Time To Be Born is a scathing and hilarious study of cynical New Yorkers stalking each other for various selfish ends. At the center of the story are a wealthy, self-involved newspaper publisher and his scheming, novelist wife, Amanda Keeler. Powell always denied that Amanda Keeler was based upon the real-life Clare Boothe Luce, until years later when she discovered a memo she''d written to herself in 1939 that said, "Why not do a novel on Clare Luce?" Which prompted Powell to write in her diary "Who can I believe? Me or myself?"

Brasserie à la française, le Café Julien, à New York, est dans les années 40 un lieu incontournable. Certains ne font que sy croiser, dautres sy retrouvent régulièrement pour se lamenter et rêver de

New York, années 1930 : le petit monde du spectacle et des médias, de la nuit et des scandales, sagite aux lueurs dune insouciance hystérique. Dans cette ambiance débridée, plusieurs êtres singuliers

La última novela de Dawn Powell, una historia sobre Nueva York, un padre ausente y la vieja bohemia de la ciudad. Una novela ambientada en Nueva York sobre un joven en busca de su verdadero padre. Segundo titulo, tras Cafe Julien, de la Biblioteca Dawn Powell, Un amor en el Golden Spur es la ultima novela de la gran escritora norteamericana, la condensacion de toda una vida dedicada a la narrativa, para muchos su obra maestra.

Deslumbrante sátira sobre la vida literaria del Nueva York clásico, quizá la tercera entrega de la ''Biblioteca Dan Powell'' sea una de las mejores novelas sobre la gran ciudad. Una hilarante carnaval de infidelidades, editores, escritores indiscretos y esposas infelices donde la verdadera protagonista es la metropoli, que respira y resplandece con luz propia en esta farsa ironica e inteligente, repleta de vanidades y traiciones.

Compañera de generación y de resacas de Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson o Scott Fitzgerald, Dawn Powel es la autora menos conocida de aquel grupo de brillantes escritores cosmopolitas. Relegada durante muchos años al olvido, fue Gore Vidal quien llamo poderosamente la atencion sobre la obra novelistica de esta escritora. Vidal subrayo la injusticia que la posteridad habia impartido a una autora acida, caustica, dueña de un muy sutil sentido del humor y de una impagable capacidad para evocar el Nueva York de los años veinte y treinta.Cafe Julien es una de sus obras tardias y, segun muchos criticos, una de las mejores. Con ella, Lumen da inicio a su Biblioteca Dawn Powell, destinada a paliar el desconocimiento por parte del publico español de una autora imprescindible.

Amanda Keeler, ravissante jeune femme de lOhio, est devenue une figure new-yorkaise grace a son mariage avec le magnat de la presse Julian Evans. Cest avec empressement que Vicky Haven, encore sous le coup dun echec sentimental, accepte linvitation de son ancienne camarade de classe, et vient tenter sa chance a New York. Comment la candide petite provinciale pourrait-elle imaginer que son amie denfance va lutiliser pour cacher sa double vie a son influent mari? Et que tous les amis dAmanda vont, tour a tour, se servir delle? Dans ce roman publie pour la premiere fois en 1942, Dawn Powell disseque la frivolite et la pretention de lelite new-yorkaise avec le talent et lhumour acerbe quon lui connait.

The “Wicked Pavilion” of the title is the Café Julien, where everybody who is anybody goes to recover from failed love affairs and to pursue new ones, to cadge money, to hatch plots, and to puncture

Everyone in Dawn Powells New York satire Angels on Toast is on the make: Lou Donovan, the entrepeneur who ricochets frantically between his well-connected current wife, his disreputable ex, and his dangerously greedy mistress; Trina Kameray, the exotic adventuress whose job title is as phony as her accent; T.V. Truesdale, the man with the aristocratic manner, the fourteen-dollar suit, and the hyperactive eye for the main chance. A dizzyingly fast-paced and deliriously entertaining novel.

NO ONE HAS SATIRIZED New York society quite like Dawn Powell, and in this classic novel she turns her sharp eye and stinging wit on the literary world, and "identifies every sort of publishing type with the patience of a pathologist removing organs for inspection." Frederick Olliver, an obscure historian and writer, is having an affair with the restively married, beautiful, and hugely successful playwright, Lyle Gaynor. Powell sets a see-saw in motion when Olliver is swept up by the tasteless publishing tycoon, Tyson Bricker, and his new book makes its way onto to the bestseller lists just as Lyles Broadway career is coming apart.

My Home is Far Away is the most precisely autobiographical of Powells fifteen novels. In this family chronicle set in early twentieth century Ohio, young Marcia Willards family struggles to keep up with the rapidly changing times, and Marcia endures disillusionment, cruelty, and betrayal to forge a survivors sense of independence. John Updike has compared Powell with Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and those other Midwestern writers who felt something epic in the national shift from rural to urban, from provincial sequestration to metropolitan liberation. By 1941, when Powell set to work on My Home Is Far Away, she was better known for the smart, boozy, bawdy, hilarious send-ups of Manhattan high and low life. She had begun to attain a reputation for high sophistication and nothing could be less sophisticated in the glittering, all-knowing, furiously present-tense, big-city manner Powell had perfected than My Home Is Far Away.This was the month of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day. It was not birthday, Easter, Christmas, or picnic, but all these things and something else, something wonderful, something utterly unknown. The two little girls in embroidered white Sunday dresses knew no way to express their secret joy but by whirling each other dizzily over the lawn crying, Were moving, were moving! Were moving to London Junction!My Home Is Far Away is one of the very few examples of a book written for adults, with an adult command of the language, that maintains the vantage point of a hungry, serious child throughout. It might be likened to a memoir that has been penned not with the usual tranquility of distance but rather with the sense that everything happening to the characters is happening right now, without any promise of eventual escape, without any assurance that childhood, too, shall pass away.My Home is Far Away had been out of print for sixty years when Steerforth reissued it in 1995. It received immediate widespread acclaim, and was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where Terry Teachout called it one of the permanent masterpieces of childhood, comparable with David Copperfield, What Maisie Knew and the early reminiscences of Colette, and where he proclaimed Powell to be one of this countrys least recognized great novelists.

Dennis Orphen, in writing a novel, has stolen the life story of his friend, Effie Callingham, the former wife of a famous, Hemingway-like novelist, Andrew Callingham. Orphens betrayal is not the only one, nor the worst one, in this hilarious satire of the New York literary scene. (Powell personally considered this to be her best New York novel.) Powell takes revenge here on all publishers, and her baffoonish MacTweed is a comic invention worthy of Dickens. And as always in Powells New York novels, the city itself becomes a central character: On the glittering black pavement legs hurried by with umbrella tops, taxis skidded along the curb, their wheels swishing through the puddles, raindrops bounced like dice in the gutter. Powells famous wit was never sharper than here, but Turn, Magic Wheel is also one of the most poignant and heart-wrenching of her novels.

This scathing comedy of manners set in the 1940s steers us through the lives of women who come to New York . . . for love, money, opportunity, and a good time (New York Times). At the center of this 1942 novel are a wealthy, self-involved newspaper publisher and his scheming, novelist wife, Amanda Keelerwho ensnares Ohioan Vicky Haven in her social and romantic manipulations. Author Dawn Powell always denied Amanda Keeler was based upon the real-life Clare Boothe Luce until years later when she discovered a memo shed written to herself in 1939 that said, Why not do a novel on Clare Luce? Which prompted Powell to write in her diary, Who can I believe? Me or myself? Set against an atmospheric backdrop of New York City in the months just before America s entry into World War II, A Time of Be Born is a scathing and hilarious study of cynical New Yorkers stalking each other for various selfish ends.