Bøger af Maeve Brennan

A haunting novella from one of the twentieth century's greatest writers

In these delightful, melancholy prose sketches Maeve Brennan goes in pursuit of the ordinary, taking us on a tour of the cheap hotels, unassuming restaurants, and crowded streets of New York City.

In the stories that compose this scintillating collection, Maeve Brennan turns her anatomist's eye to the ugly feelings that teem just beneath the surface of family life - doing so, however, with an attention to detail that makes these unsparing portraits luminous and exquisite.

"The first part of this book reprints Maeve Brennan's The long-winded lady published by William Morrow & Company in 1969... Our 'Postscript' adds nine 'long-winded lady' items to Maeve Brennan's original selection of forty-seven."--Publisher's note

Irish-American writer Maeve Brennan, who died in 1993, is justly admired for her stories and articles for the New Yorker, and this novella - written in the 1940s but not published until 2001 - gives added evidence of her gifts. The story has a wrenching sadness that leaves a mark on the reader, its tale of rejection and loneliness almost too hard to bear. The title - as spare and forthright as the writer's style - is exactly right At 16 Anastasia left her home in Dublin to follow her mother to exile in Paris. Now, six years later, she is coming home to her grandmother only to find that that word is denied to her as she is asked how long she intends to stay. A meticulous evocation of the old lady, her equally aged servant and the preserved past of their house creates an atmosphere of musty despair. Increasingly dislocated from ordinary life, Anastasia persists in her hope that she will be welcomed and loved. She rebuffs suggestions that she should make her life elsewhere and refuses to acknowledge her grandmother's polite coldness. As Anastasia begins to lose hope Brennan demonstrates her gift for conveying the deadliness of spite without exaggeration. In a chilling few lines she shows the girl withdrawing from normal life: 'Now in the city there are two worlds. One world has walls around it and one world has people round it.' Anastasia wants to be loved in that world with walls around it but she is locked out. (Kirkus UK)

A literary eventtwenty 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 "e;the capsized cityhalf-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."e; 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.

The Philip Larkin I Knew traces the author's close friendship with the poet and stretches over his 30 year tenure of office as librarian of the University of Hull. -- .