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 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 New Yorker’s finest writers.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Editors at the 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
There's been a lot of rhapsodizing over the mythic heyday of the New Yorker under Harold Ross and Wallace Shawn. This aptly titled book, originally published in 1969 and long out of print, recalls how that heyday actually translated on the page. Although details of New York in an earlier time do have their appeal in this collection of columns that appeared in the magazine's "Talk of the Town" section from 1953 to 1968 (supplemented here by six other columns and three features), Brennan often displays what comes off as a grating smugness and an overly arch narrative distance. In "The Flower Children," Brennan watches from a window in her apartment on Washington Place while a Vietnam protest goes on below. Musing on "Movie Stars at Large," she recounts the time she watched Elizabeth Taylor filming a scene in Butterfield 8, then tells of a dream of hers involving Greta Garbo. Some of this material has aged badly, like the passage in "Just a Pair of Show-Offs" noting that "for over a year now Sixth Avenue has been monopolized by youngAvery youngAblack girls in huge gold and silver wigs." Brennan herself is never involved in any of these activities; she is merely an observer. Perhaps when read individually in the magazine these pieces were charming, or perhaps times have simply changed too much for such musings to hold appeal.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An elegant and observant writer,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (Paperback)
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.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For All You People Watchers,
By sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (Paperback)
This exquisite book of short essays is for you. She captures New York of the `60s in her highly focused vignettes. A long-time writer for The New Yorker, these sketches were featured in the "Talk of the Town" section of the magazine always beginning with "Our friend, the long-winded lady, has written us as follows:" I always looked forward to them and vaguely thought the author was likely to be a well-heeled matron of impressive family lineage with a flair for turning words. My impression was totally incorrect. Ms. Brennan emigrated from Ireland at age 17, never had much money or security and viewed herself as "a traveler in residence."She gave personalities to streets, buildings, and stores as well as people. " Sixth Avenue possesses a quality that some people acquire, sometimes quite suddenly, which dooms it and them to be loved only at the moment they are being looked at for the very last time." Her focus is keen and unblinking, but she sometimes infuses the scene and the people with the magic of her imagination. Her word portraits are so incisive, I often felt that I was sitting beside her seeing a man "morose and dignified, as though humiliation had taken him unawares, but not unprepared." There is a certain sadness and loneliness in Ms. Brennan's peripheral outsider remarks, but you never feel pity only admiration for an author that always looks outward to keep from looking inward.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A small masterpiece in a blue key,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (Paperback)
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.
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