Product Description

From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote for the New Yorker's ""Talk of the Town"" department under the pen name The Long-Winded Lady. Her unforgettable sketches - prose snapshots of life in small restaurants, cheap hotels and crowded streets - form a timeless, bittersweet tribute to what she called ""the most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human of cities"". First published in 1969, The Long-Winded Lady is a celebration of one of New York's greatest writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #218040 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

A small masterpiece in a blue key
Maeve Brennan was born in Dublin, which she wrote about in "Springs of Affection," a book that the editors at Amazon named one of the best of 1997. She came to the US when she was 17, and in her 30s hooked up with The New Yorker, for which she wrote the 50-odd sketches about daily life in Manhattan that are collected in "The Long-Winded Lady."

Where the Dublin stories are savage studies of failed marriages, these New York sketches are gentler in tone, more wistful and blue. Brennan, the "I" of all these pieces, eavesdrops on conversations in the bars, streets, and hotel lobbies of the seedier parts of Times Square and the Village. Her vivid, precise reports are then fleshed out with sepeculations, opinions, and little autobiographical details that reveal her own humorous, melancholy sensibility. The book ends up being not just an incomparable time capsule of the city of the 1950s and '60s, but also a self-portrait of one of its many silent "travellers in residence," a somewhat timid, ultra keen-eyed, super-sensitive exile trying to keep her bearings in an often inhuman metropolis. Brennan is never precious, never self-pitying. And there's not a dull or cloying or lame sentence in the book. "The Long-Winded Lady" is a small masterpiece, and both it and "Springs of Affection" are not to be missed.

An elegant and observant writer
I am so impressed with this book. Brennan's eye for detail, her descriptions of New York, her own loneliness are written in prose that any writer would envy. I have recommended this book to a couple of friends and also will suggest it for my bookclub. Brennan's writing sometimes reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting-the way she captures the light from a room across the way, her observations of situations in restaurants, hotel lobbies, and subways. I read somewhere that she had a terrible breakdown and her last column was written in the early 80's. After that she was seen wandering the streets of NY. I bought this book on a recommendation and never expected to be so moved. Also the book brings the reader back to the 60's.