The Long-winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker [Paperback]

“Of all the incomparable stable of journalists who wrote forThe New Yorkerduring its glory days in the Fifties and Sixties,” writesThe Independent, “the most distinctive was Irish-born Maeve Brennan.” From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote forThe New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column 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 Ladyis a celebration of one of The New Yorker’s finest writers at the height of her power. 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.

PRAISE FORTHE LONG-WINDED LADY:

This is another timely recommendation as a new edition of Irish-born, Maeve Brennan’s short story collectionThe Springs of Affectionhas just been reprinted by the Dublin-based press Stinging Fly. I’d definitely urge readers to seek this out too, but personally I have a soft spot for her non-fiction. Between 1954 and 1968 Brennan supplied copy for theNew Yorker’s Talk of the Town section under the fabulous pen name ‘The Long-Winded Lady’. Her vignettes of Manhattan life combine the detachment of the flaneuse with the lived experience of her own street-dwelling subjects – especially poignant given Brennan became homeless towards the end of her life and lived out of the ladies’ bathroom at the offices of the New Yorker. —BBC

“Of all the incomparable stablel³.