"Remarkable ... Fiction of the highest order, controlled, wise, and fearless. Not many writers go this deep or far from home." - Ambrose Clancy, The Nation
'These feel transparently modern, the way that Dubliners by Joyce feels modern...Brennan remains precise, unyielding: something lovely and unbearable is happening on the page.' - Anne Enright
"Wide-ranging, savage, poignant... full of small miracles."
The twenty-one stories collected here - the very best stories of one of The New Yorker's finest writers - trace the patterns of love within three Dublin families, patterns as intricate and various as Irish lace. 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, 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.
In an introduction, William Maxwell, who was for twenty years Maeve Brennan's editor, writes of the spcial quality of her work, and especially of the title story, which he places among the great short fiction of this century.
Maeve Brennan left Ireland for America in 1934, when she was seventeen. In 1949 she joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she contributed book reviews, fashion notes, essays, and short stories. The Long-Winded Lady (1969), her collection of sketches for "The Talk of the Town," has lately been reissued by Mariner Books. Maeve Brennan died in 1993 at the age of seventy-six.
