Turn, Magic Wheel

'Marks the emergence of the Dawn Powell we recall today' The Baffler

'Wry and engrossing' London Review of Books

Dennis is a precocious young novelist with an eye for a good story. But when his latest book pilfers the heartache of his best friend Effie for literary material, their bond is put to the test.

Effie has clung to the hope that her husband will return to her, a decade after leaving for a younger woman. Meanwhile, Dennis finds himself entangled with the unavailable Corrine. As scandal and romantic complications mount, both must set the narrative straight in this barbed, moving satire of New York's literati.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Dawn Powell (1896-1965) was a novelist and playwright known for her satires of New York's cultural and literary circles. Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, she endured a tumultuous childhood before running away at thirteen to live with an aunt who encouraged her writing aspirations. After graduating from Lake Erie College, Powell moved to New York City, immersing herself in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village.

She gained early recognition for her witty pieces in The New Yorker and Esquire, and in 1939 became a Scribner author, sharing the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although Powell enjoyed a devoted circle of admirers, her work drifted into obscurity after her death. Interest in her novels was later revived by the tireless work of Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page, executor of her estate, and also through Gore Vidal's influential appraisal in The New York Review of Books<