Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #354373 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Synopsis
From the author of The Springs of Affection comes a second and final collection-20 masterly short stories from the glory days of The New Yorker. "Reading Maeve Brennan is like watching a master jeweler construct a ticking watch from an array of tiny, inanimate parts." -Linda Barrett Osborne, New York Times Book Review"So good that I kept putting the book down to savor a description or perfect phrase, to hug myself with malicious joy, and to put off the evil hour when the stories would be done." -Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday GlobeWhen The Springs of Affection was published in 1997, the poet Eamon Grennan called it a classic, a book that placed Maeve Brennan "among the best Irish short-story writers since Joyce." The Rose Garden gathers the rest of her short fiction, some of it set in her native Dublin but most of it in and around her adopted Manhattan. The riches here are many, but the collection's centerpiece is a suite of satirical scenes from suburban life, stories "a little meaner than Cheever's, and wittier than Updike's" (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

Customer Reviews

a beautiful read
Maeve Brennan's writing, although increasingly difficult to find, is beautiful, precise, enjoyable, knock-about, sly, funny, sad, and uplifting. Yes, really, it is ALL those things! These are short stories set in her adopted New York or in Dublin, where she grew up and lived until she was 18. Brennan was an accomplished writer who can easily match up to other excellent short story writers such as Mansfield. Human failing & fraility through love, heart-ache, insecurity, and vanity puncture the egos of many of the people who populate these pages. Many of the characters recur in more than one story. Amongst the most loving and delightful are the tales of Bluebell the labrador, who suffers city life whilst waiting anxiously to go back to the seaside. You can almost smell the ocean in Brennan's evocation of life at the beach. I found myself rationing a certain number of pages a night so that I wouldn't finish the book... unfortunately I did anyway.