Maeve Brennan

The Springs of Affection

Stories of Dublin

A collection of twenty-one stories centering three Irish families from The New Yorker’s acclaimed “Long-Winded Lady,” Maeve Brennan

The stories collected here trace the patterns of love within three Dublin families. Love between husband and wife, which begins in courtship and laughter, loses all power of expression and then vanishes forever. The natural love of sister for brother and of mother for son is twisted into the rage to possess. And love that gives rise to the rituals of family life—those "ordinary customs that are the only true realities most of us ever know"—grows solid as rock that will never give way.

With an introduction by William Maxwell, who was for twenty years Maeve Brennan's editor, The Springs of Affection reveals Brennan to be one of the most innovative and important writers of the 20th century.

The Long-Winded Lady

Notes from The New Yorker

“Maeve Brennan . . . helped put New York back into The New Yorker, and has written about the city of the sixties with both honesty and affection . . . She is constantly alert, sharp-eyed as a sparrow for the crumbs of human event, the overheard and the glimpsed and the guessed at, that form a solitary city person’s least expensive amusement.” —John Updike, author of Rabbit, Run

From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote for The New Yorker under the pen name "The Long–Winded Lady." Her unforgettable sketches—prose snapshots of life in small restaurants, cheap hotels, and crowded streets of Times Square and the Village—together 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 the twentieth century’s most accomplished storytellers and documentarians of city life. As contemporary culture revisits with new appreciation the pioneering female voices of the past century, Maeve Brennan remains a writer whose dazzling work continues to embolden a new generation.

The Rose Garden

Short Stories

A literary event—twenty short stories spanning Dublin and New York City—from the acclaimed "Long-Winded Lady" of The New Yorker, Maeve Brennan

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—a city, like Joyce's, of paralyzed souls and unexpressed love—but most of it in and around her adopted Manhattan, which she once called "the capsized city—half–capsized, anyway, with the inhabitants hanging on, most of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their life's predicament."

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). Some of the stories are quietly tender, some ferociously satirical, some unique in their chilly emotional weather; all are Maeve Brennan at her incomparable best.