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.

Stories of Dublin.

Born in Dublin in 1917 to politically active parents, Maeve Brennan's childhood in Ireland was moulded by the cultural ideologies of nationalism and lit by the creative energy of the Abbey and Gate theatres. She was seventeen when her father was appointed to the Irish Legation in Washington DC, where he was Irish Minister throughout World War II. Maeve worked writing fashion copy at Harper's Bazaar until 1949, when William Shawn invited her to join the New Yorker. Tiny, impeccably groomed, and devastatingly witty, in William Maxwell's words, 'to be around her was to see style being invented'. She wrote important fiction, criticism and Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker magazine throughout its most influential period in the 1950s and '60s, focusing on memory, migration and identity; her material, and women's lives. As this richly researched and wide-ranging book makes clear, Maeve Brennan's effect on the people who met her, her eye for human behaviour, clothing and domestic settings, her unsparing reading of literature, her memory of home and her courageous life as a woman alone in metropolitan America make her an icon of the twentieth century.

A literary event—twenty short stories by the late Maeve Brennan, one of The new Yorker's most admired writers. Five are set in the author's native Dublin, a city, like Joyce's, of paralyzed souls and unexpressed love. the others are set 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." 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.

Maeve Brennan had a close friendship with Philip Larkin, as well as working with him for a number of years. In this book, she provides new insight into the poet's complex personality, overturning the perceived image of him as a misanthrope.

The current revival of the work of Maeve Brennan, who died in obscurity in 1993, has won her a reputation as a twentieth–century classic—one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce. Now, unexpectedly, Brennan's oeuvre is immeasurably deepened and broadened by a miraculous literary discovery—a short novel written in the mid–1940s, but till now unknown and unpublished. Recently found in a university archive, it is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temper. The Visitor is the haunting tale of Anastasia King, who, at the age of twenty–two, returns to her grandmother's house—the very house where she grew up—after six long years away. She has been in Paris, comforting her disgraced and dying mother, the runaway from a disastrous marriage to Anastasia's late father, the grandmother's only son. "It's a pity she sent for you." the grandmother says, smiling with anger. "And a pity you went after her. It broke your father's heart."Anastasia pays dearly for the choice she made, a choice that now costs her her own strong sense of family and makes her an exile—a visitor—in the place she once called home. Penelope Fitzgerald, writing of Brennan's story "The Springs of Affection," said that it carries an "electric charge of resentment and quiet satisfaction in revenge that chills you right through." The same can be said of the The Visitor, Maeve Brennan's "lost" novel—the early work of an incomparable master.

While filming a documentary about Quentins, a famed Dublin restaurant, Ella Brady explores the changing face of the city from the 1970s to the present day as she captures the stories of the people who have made Quentins a center of their lives. Reprint.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Copper Beech is as soothing as a cup of tea.”—People In the little Irish town of Shancarrig, the young people carve their initials—and those of their loves—into the copper beech tree in front of the schoolhouse. But not even Father Gunn, the parish priest, who knows most of what goes on behind Shancarrig’s closed doors, or Dr. Jims, the village doctor, who knows all the rest, realize that not everything in the placid village is what it seems. Unexpected passions and fears are bringing together many lives, such as the sensitive new priest and Miss Ross, the slight, beautiful schoolteacher . . . Leonora, the privileged daughter of the town’s richest family, and Foxy Dunne, whose father did time in jail . . . and Nessa Ryan, whose parents run Ryan’s Hotel, and two very different young men. For now the secrets in Shancarrig’s shadows are starting to be revealed, from innocent vanities and hidden loves to crimes of the heart . . . and even to murder. Praise for The Copper Beech “A book with a difference . . . You’ll take it home to lend to your best friend.”—The New York Times Book Review “Binchy makes you laugh, cry, and care. Her warmth and sympathy render the daily struggles of ordinary people heroic and turn storytelling into art.”—San Francisco Chronicle “The Copper Beech finds author Maeve Binchy at her Irish storytelling best!”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

Gardner Botsford's A Life of Privilege tells the fascinating and humorous story of his WWII experiences, from his assignment to the infantry due to a paperwork error to a fearful trans-Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary, to landing under heavy fire on Omaha Beach and the Liberation of Paris. After the war, he began a distinguished literary career as a long-time editor at the New Yorker, and chronicles the magazine's rise and influence on postwar American culture with wit and grace.

“If Tina Fey and David Sedaris had a daughter, she would be Maeve Higgins.” —Glamour A startlingly hilarious essay collection about one woman’s messy path to finding her footing in New York City, from breakout comedy star and podcaster Maeve Higgins Maeve Higgins was a bestselling author and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the grand old age of thirty-one, she left the only home she’d ever known in search of something more and found herself in New York City. Together, the essays in Maeve in America create a smart, funny, and revealing portrait of a woman who aims for the stars but sometimes hits the ceiling and the inimitable city that helped make her who she is. Here are stories of not being able to afford a dress for the ball, of learning to live with yourself while you’re still figuring out how to love yourself, of the true significance of realizing what sort of shelter dog you would be. Self-aware and laugh-out-loud funny, this collection is also a fearless exploration of the awkward questions in life, such as: Is clapping too loudly at a gig a good enough reason to break up with somebody? Is it ever really possible to leave home? “Maeve Higgins is hilarious, poignant, conversational, and my favorite Irish import since U2. You’re in for a treat.” —Phoebe Robinson