[issybird]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

Congratulations to issybird, our third lottery winner, who has been randomly selected from the nominees to choose this month's work.

Randomly! But I'll take it however I can get it.

Choosing has been a fun and nerve-wracking process. I rejected at least 15 possibilites, some of them, I must admit, near and dear to my heart. But in the end, I went with a dark-horse candidate:

Turn, Magic Wheel, by Dawn Powell, originally published in 1936, a send-up of the New York literary world.

Powell's work has been described thusly:

Powell's wicked sense of humor, keen ear for dialogue and human sense of pathos pervade her barbed, shrewd fiction about mid-century Americans in Manhattan and Ohio. "Always sharp, never cranky, and with a pagan's delight in the pleasures of this world, Powell's work elaborates the human comedy with a vigor matched only by its unpretentious wisdom," wrote one of her critics.

Most of her work was out of print at her death in 1965, but she has since undergone more than one renaissance. From the New York Times: "Few American novelists have been so lavishly praised by so many high-powered critics to so little effect."

Also from the Times: "[S]he is wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the heartland and has a more supple control of satirical voice than Evelyn Waugh, the writer to whom she's most often compared."

Turn, Magic Wheel is available at Amazon, Kobo, B&N, Sony and presumably other venues. The inkmesh search only shows Diesel.