Books featured in SF Issue 60 Archives

Manhattan Moments

Kristian Doyle on Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker

In January 1954, a vignette appeared in the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ section, introduced only vaguely as a missive from ‘a rather long-winded lady’. The piece – like all ‘Talk’ stories then, unsigned – was a lightly sardonic first-person account of a woman’s disastrous experience in a dress shop. It might not have been world-changing, but it did stand out from the usual ‘Talk’ pieces, which were often impersonal, mannered little things, written in the royal ‘we’. The Long-Winded Lady, though, idiosyncratic from the beginning, spoke only for herself. ‘Well, there you are,’ she signed off, ‘in case you’ve paid any attention.’

18 Jan 2019

Books featured in SF Issue 60

Drawn from Memory & Drawn from Life (Nos. 44 & 45)

The Unwomanly Face of War

Boys in Zinc

Chernobyl Prayer

Second-Hand Time

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Uncommon Reader

Kolymsky Heights

Barnaby Rudge

The Tortoise and the Hare

The Little White Horse

Kensuke’s Kingdom

War Horse

Why the Whales Came

The Living Mountain

The Quincunx

The Common Reader, Vol. 1

The Common Reader, Vol. 2

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