About the book

During the 1950s and 1960s, Maeve Brennan contributed numerous vignettes to 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 the 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.” 

"Anyone familiar with New York will enjoy a transporting jolt of recognition from these pages. Looking back from our own time, when it seems that every column has to be loaded with hectoring opinion and egotistical preening, Brennan’s stylish scrutiny of minor embarrassments and small pleasures is as welcome as a Dry Martini.” —The Independent

Anyone with a special relationship with New York should read this! Between 1954 and 1981, Maeve Brennan alias The Long-Winded Lady wrote the "Talk of the Town" column for The New Yorker. This book is a collection of her essays. About the most ruthless, ambitious, confusing, funny, sad, cold and humane city.

Ricarda Messner

Ricarda Messner

Publisher and Curator

New York City

in the Literature Atlas

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