The Rose Garden

A literary event—twenty short stories spanning Dublin and New York City—from the acclaimed "Long-Winded Lady" of The New Yorker, Maeve Brennan

When The Springs of Affection was published in 1997, the poet Eamon Grennan called it a classic, a book that placed Maeve Brennan among the best Irish short-story writers since Joyce. The Rose Garden gathers the rest of her short fiction, some of it set in her native Dublin—a city, like Joyce's, of paralyzed souls and unexpressed love—but most of it 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."

The riches here are many, but the collection's centerpiece is a suite of satirical scenes from suburban life, stories a little meaner than Cheever's, and wittier than Updike's (Los Angeles Times Book Review). 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.
"Reading Maeve Brennan is like watching a master jeweler construct a ticking watch from an array of tiny, inanimate parts." —Linda Barrett Osborne, The New York Times Book Review

"So good that I kept putting the book down to savor a description or perfect phrase, to hug myself with malicious joy, and to put off the evil hour when the stories would be done." —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe

“A welcome companion volume to 1997’s The Springs of Affection . . . Brennan had a real genius tor tracing the downward arcs followed by people who perversely throw away their best chances for happiness. Her finest stories resemble and rival the fiction of Frank O’Connor and Mary Lavin, and are well worth retrieving.” —Kirkus Reviews
MAEVE BRENNAN left Ireland for America in 1934, when she was seventeen. In 1949, she joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she contributed reviews, essays, and short stories. Her acclaimed works The Rose Garden, The Visitor, and The Springs of Affection are also available from Counterpoint. Maeve Brennan died in 1993 at the age of seventy–six.