Search results for ""Author Maeve Brennan""

'And at last Min was released from the duty she had imposed on herself, to remain with him as long as he needed her.' In the stories that compose this 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. Brennan's subjects are ordinary people worn down by life, by its disappointments, its little humiliations. Yet they are also dreamers, defiantly hopeful of one day overstepping the narrow confines of the situations in which, unaccountably, they find themselves. These are stories that ache; pitting imagination against circumstance, they are at once claustrophobic and expansive, heartbreaking and miraculous. With a new introduction by acclaimed novelist Claire-Louise Bennett, The Springs of Affection reveals Maeve Brennan to be one of the 20th century's most innovative and important writers.

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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. Brennan presents herself as the long-winded lady, solitary wanderer and wry observer of the human comedy. Whether she is riding the subway, failing to eat broccoli in a deserted restaurant, or watching lovers quarrel in Washington Square, Brennan manages to capture the wavering spectacle of the metropolis with an uncanny precision that makes these slight essays at once hallucinatory and hyperreal. Originally written for The New Yorker between 1954 and 1981 and presented here in full with a new introduction by Sinéad Gleeson, these pieces reveal Maeve Brennan to be one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished documentarians of city life, and one of its finest essayists.

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