false 172661 0 0 299435 0395893631 9780395893630 3 <![CDATA[The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173509340m/299435.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173509340s/299435.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/299435.The_Long_Winded_Lady_Notes_from_the_New_Yorker 4.33 27 New Yorker may come and go, but readers will always return for the great cartoons and the "Talk of the Town." One of the best-loved contributors to the latter--the magazine's own brand of gossip column--was Maeve Brennan who, from 1954 to 1981, offered her wry observations of New York life under the sobriquet "The Long-Winded Lady." This compendium of her articles was first published in 1969 and is now reprinted with the addition of nine more previously uncollected pieces. The result is the answer to every "Talk of the Town"-lover's prayer.

Take, for example, "A Young Man with a Menu," in which Brennan watches "a young man persuade a girl to join him for dinner by reading the menu to her over the telephone." She describes the restaurant, Longchamps, as "ready-made for episodes of intrigue and pursuit" and the first appearance of the young man--"his expression as he entered the restaurant said that he was intent on something--one thing--and indifferent to everything else." She takes us through the phone call, which she observes from a distance: "He read from all sections of the menu. I had a menu of my own, so I could tell just about where he was." But, typically Brennan-like, she ushers us out of the piece just as the girl arrives, without letting us "even see the color of her hair." Every piece in this collection is as precise and as surprising as this one; anyone who loves New York, The New Yorker, or Maeve Brennan will savor The Long-Winded Lady. --Alix Wilber

]]> 172661 4.03 240 37 1998 933715 1582431191 9781582431192 3 <![CDATA[The Rose Garden: Short Stories]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179586068m/933715.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179586068s/933715.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933715.The_Rose_Garden_Short_Stories 4.15 27 "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 Globe

When 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).

]]> 172661 4.03 240 37 2000 933716 0395937590 9780395937594 2 <![CDATA[The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179586070m/933716.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179586070s/933716.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933716.The_Springs_of_Affection_Stories_of_Dublin 4.38 21 In Brennan's acute hands, this proverbial phrase has more sorrow than joy about it, and in the collection's two other sequences, the emotions are far more raw. Husbands and wives are deadlocked in loveless marriages--the men longing for escape, the women desperate for contact. These are visions of powerful feelings, powerfully quelled, and there are some heart-freezing juxtapositions. One story ends with a young couple coming together; in the very next, 27 years later, ill will is everywhere.

But Brennan, whose life seems to have been even more tragic than that of any of her characters, can also anatomize peace, or at least respite. In "The Carpet with the Big Pink Roses on It," Mrs. Bagot and her child and pets (also on the shakiest of ground with Mr. Bagot) fall into an afternoon slumber. "They all slept safely. There wasn't a sound in the house. Nobody came to the door. Nobody saw them. There on the bed they might all have been invisible, or enchanted, or, as they were for that time, forgotten." Alas, such states of grace are momentary in Brennan's houses. According to William Maxwell, the title novella--a brilliant anatomy of envy and hate--"belongs with the great short stories of this century." So do several other pieces in The Springs of Affection.

]]> 172661 4.03 240 37 1997 893380 1903809770 9781903809778 3 <![CDATA[The Visitor]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179249855m/893380.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179249855s/893380.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/893380.The_Visitor 3.72 18 New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan delivered a posthumous one-two with her biting collections The Springs of Affection and The Rose Garden. Now comes The Visitor, a previously unpublished novella written in the 1940s. In Brennan's stories, something quietly horrid has always just happened, or is just about to happen, or both. In The Visitor, it seems to be both. Twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King returns to Dublin after living with her mother in Paris for the past six years. The two left behind Anastasia's father and his fierce old mother. It is to this scary granny that Anastasia returns, now that her mother and father have died. But she is met by an implacable rage: Mrs. King has determined not to forgive Anastasia for deserting the family. Brennan sketches in this woman's nastiness in just a few lines. Typically, she writes around her character, rather than tackling her head on: "Mrs. King came into the room in silence. She sat down without speaking, arranging her long black skirt about her long-hidden, unimaginable knees, and examining the tea tray with a critical eye." It is clear that while Anastasia thinks she has come home to stay, she is a mere visitor, and an unwelcome one at that.

Few writers so delicately and cruelly parse their countrymen; Brennan wickedly lays bare the malicious repression of the Irish. Even as she satirizes her sanctimonious people, she makes us know that the pain they inflict and feel is real. All this witty psychologizing is done with a minimum of characters and plot. The Visitor reads like an Elizabeth Bowen novel without all those words, or like Washington Square with jokes. Brennan even provides what might be called poetry, if that word weren't so cheap: a statue of the Virgin Mary has a "pale and averted face, sweet and moodless." The Visitor makes its departure all too quickly. --Claire Dederer

]]> 172661 4.03 240 37 2000 5669146 1582435014 9781582435015 0 <![CDATA[The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5669146.The_Long_Winded_Lady_Notes_from_The_New_Yorker 4.00 3 172661 4.03 240 37 2009 5669192 1582435006 9781582435008 0 <![CDATA[The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/56/192/5669192-m-1255723195.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/56/192/5669192-s-1255723195.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5669192.The_Springs_of_Affection_Stories_of_Dublin 4.00 1 172661 4.03 240 37 2009 933717 0684136430 9780684136431 0 <![CDATA[Christmas Eve: 13 stories]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933717.Christmas_Eve_13_stories 4.00 1 172661 4.03 240 37 1974 933723 0719062764 9780719062766 0 <![CDATA[The Philip Larkin I Knew]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179586098m/933723.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179586098s/933723.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933723.The_Philip_Larkin_I_Knew 3.00 1 The Philip Larkin I Knew traces the author’s close friendship with the poet and stretches over his 30 year tenure of office as librarian of the University of Hull, taking in his literary achievements from The Less Deceived (1955), through The Whitsun Weddings (1964), to High Windows (1974). It reveals Larkin in a new light – courteous, compassionate, generous, and a man of deep sensitivity and charm – with a natural sense of fun and instinctive wit; in contrast to the gloomy and somewhat objectionable portrait that has emerged since his death.
</div>]]> 172661 4.03 240 37 2002 4880283 1902602668 9781902602660 0 <![CDATA[The Visitor]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4880283.The_Visitor 0.0 0 172661 4.03 240 37 2001 3940914 0719062756 9780719062759 0 <![CDATA[The Philip Larkin I Knew]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3940914.The_Philip_Larkin_I_Knew 0.0 0 The Philip Larkin I Knew traces the author’s close friendship with the poet and stretches over his 30 year tenure of office as librarian of the University of Hull, taking in his literary achievements from The Less Deceived (1955), through The Whitsun Weddings (1964), to High Windows (1974). It reveals Larkin in a new light – courteous, compassionate, generous, and a man of deep sensitivity and charm – with a natural sense of fun and instinctive wit; in contrast to the gloomy and somewhat objectionable portrait that has emerged since his death.
</div>]]> 172661 4.03 240 37 2002