Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Paper like that could make you a writer, if anything could.

The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell

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I have now read two Dawn Powell books, and they share something in common that makes them both enjoyable, but also unfortunately limited. For me, I am missing the key knowledge to really sink my teeth into this one. What I mean, is that there’s a kind of clear social satire at the heart of this novel. At its broadest I fully engage with it and enjoy it and think there’s a lot of good and funny happening here. But this is also limiting, because […]

This was no time to cry over one broken heart.

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This book is very funny. It’s also the kind of book that if the first page does not work for you, you should stop immediately. It begins with an authorial lamentation against the onset of World War II because of the ways that a momentously life-changing event like the war would drown out the lives of the small people, especially of young women like the co-protagonist of this novel, an up and coming player in the New York literary scene. This lamentation is interesting in […]

Why Don’t We Know Dawn Powell?

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I hadn’t heard of writer Dawn Powell (1896-1965) until last year when her name came up the the New York Times book review section called “By The Book,” wherein the Times provides a series of questions to writers about their reading habits. Anjelica Huston — model, actress, and memoirist — mentioned Powell as a favorite writer whose works deserved to be filmed but, curiously, never had been. So I looked her up and discovered that Powell moved from Ohio to New York in the early […]



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