Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower published several well received novels in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. Her much anticipated fifth novel, In Certain Circles, was set to be published in 1971 when Harrower abruptly changed her mind and withheld it from publication. She essentially retired from writing shortly afterward. In 2014, Text Publishing was able to get Harrower to agree to the publication of In Certain Circles, a novel of post-war Australia that focuses on social class, trauma, and their impact on friendships and romantic relationships. […]
It Is What It Is
This novel is short and told in what I might call an impressionist manner, its form occasionally reminiscent of entries that you could find in Twitter or FaceBook updates. And yet in the end, it is a very rich story of a marriage and motherhood, with poetry, philosophy and some wry commentary on both institutions along the way. The narrator, who refers to herself as “the wife,” takes us through the highlights and lowlights of her adult life: dating, yoga, work, colic, bedbugs, infidelity, and […]
Why Don’t We Know Dawn Powell?
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 […]
The Measure of a Man
Edna Ferber was once the most famous female novelist in the United States. A member of the famed Algonquin Table, Ferber wrote several novels that were turned into classic movies, including Showboat, Giant, and Cimarron. Ferber’s So Big won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for literature. I’m not sure why her novels get so little attention these days. This is the first that I have read, and I am probably going to try a few more. I found So Big to be a timely and relevant […]