The Long-winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker

“Of all the incomparable stable of journalists who wrote for The New Yorker during its glory days in the Fifties and Sixties,” writes The Independent, “the most distinctive was Irish-born Maeve Brennan.” From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote for The 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 Lady is 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.