Written between the 1930s and the 1950s, the novels of Dawn Powell evoke a time when an artist manqué could come to New York with no money and improvise a life there within days; an era when even the most melancholy hotel housed a population of genteel eccentrics. They are comic masterpieces, inhabited by charming hacks, hustlers, and poseurs, deliciously venal men, Machiavellian women, and monstrous children.

In the world of Angels on Toast (1940), everyone is triumphantly on the make. Lou Donovan, the entrepreneur who ricochets frantically between his well-connected 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. The deals and machinations of these characters make this novel dizzyingly fast-paced and deliriously entertaining.