The Springs of Affection

The Springs of Affection
Author: Maeve Brennan
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 374
Release: 1998-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780395937594

Stories of Dublin.

The Long-Winded Lady

The Long-Winded Lady
Author: Maeve Brennan
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1619026546

From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" department 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.

The Rose Garden

The Rose Garden
Author: Maeve Brennan
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1619026538

A literary event—twenty 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 "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." 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.

Summer of Change

Summer of Change
Author: Elena Aitken
Publisher: Elena Aitken
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2014-02-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1927968089

An enemies to lovers, opposites attract, small-town romance from USA Today Best Selling Author, Elena Aitken. He's used to getting what he wants. And he wants her. Successful, handsome and too damn charming for his own good—he's perfect. The only problem? Letting him in could destroy everything she knows and loves. Samantha Burke loves her quiet close-knit community of Cedar Springs, just the way it is thank you very much. The addition of an upscale new resort as well as its arrogant owner, Trent Harrison, and the change they're both sure to bring to town, is certainly not welcome. As far as Sam's concerned, Trent can turn right around and go back to where he came from. That is, until one very hot—and completely unexpected—kiss changes everything. Now Trent is pushing his way into her town, and her life and it's getting harder and harder for Sam to deny the heat between them. Change is inevitable, but can either of them drop their guard long enough to accept it when there's so much on the line? Including the chance for love?

Maeve Brennan

Maeve Brennan
Author: Angela Bourke
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Born in Dublin in 1917 to politically active parents, Maeve Brennan's childhood in Ireland was moulded by the cultural ideologies of nationalism and lit by the creative energy of the Abbey and Gate theatres. She was seventeen when her father was appointed to the Irish Legation in Washington DC, where he was Irish Minister throughout World War II. Maeve worked writing fashion copy at Harper's Bazaar until 1949, when William Shawn invited her to join the New Yorker. Tiny, impeccably groomed, and devastatingly witty, in William Maxwell's words, 'to be around her was to see style being invented'. She wrote important fiction, criticism and Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker magazine throughout its most influential period in the 1950s and '60s, focusing on memory, migration and identity; her material, and women's lives. As this richly researched and wide-ranging book makes clear, Maeve Brennan's effect on the people who met her, her eye for human behaviour, clothing and domestic settings, her unsparing reading of literature, her memory of home and her courageous life as a woman alone in metropolitan America make her an icon of the twentieth century.

Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!
Author: Fannie Flagg
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2011-06-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307790959

A funny, serious, and compelling novel by Fannie Flagg, author of the beloved Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (and prize-winning co-writer of the classic movie). “[This] tale of tough, eccentric, endearing women who first endure and then prevail. . . . will make you laugh out loud—and shed a few tears. . . . Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! is another rattling success.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch Once again, Flagg's humor and respect and affection for her characters shine forth. Many inhabit small-town or suburban America. But this time, her heroine is urban: a brainy, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. Dena Nordstrom, pride of the network, is a woman whose future is full of promise, her present rich with complications, and her past marked by mystery. Among the colorful cast of characters are: Sookie, of Selma, Alabama, Dena's exuberant college roommate, who is everything that Dena is not; she is thrilled by Dena's success and will do everything short of signing autographs for her; Sookie's a mom, a wife, and a Kappa forever Dena's cousins, the Warrens, and her aunt Elner, of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, endearing, loyal, talkative, ditsy, and, in their way, wise Neighbor Dorothy, whose spirit hovers over them all through the radio show that she broadcast from her home in the 1940s Sidney Capello, pioneer of modern sleaze journalism and privateer of privacy, and Ira Wallace, his partner in tabloid television Several doctors, all of them taken with—and almost taken in by-Dena There are others, captivated by a woman who tries to go home again, not knowing where home or love lie.

A Short Time to Stay Here

A Short Time to Stay Here
Author: Terry Roberts
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2016-12-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1681629534

The summer of 1917 should have been a summer like any other. Stephen Robbins should have been doing the same thing he'd been doing for years past. As a young boy he'd fled his life in a secluded mountain cove and risen through the ranks to become the manager of the South's finest resort, the elegant Mountain Park Hotel. By all rights, he should have spent this summer as host to some of the wealthiest gentry on the East Coast. Hans Ruser, German Commodore of the world's largest and most luxurious cruise liner, Vaderland, should have been sailing yet again with his elite passengers to the far corners of the world. And Anna Ulmann, captivating and beautiful, should have been at home in her New York mansion planning yet another lavish dinner party for her famous husband and his rich and powerful friends. She should have idled away her spare time by taking perfectly staged photographic portraits of the very same people. But war will change everything that should have been in that summer of 1917— the U.S. enters WWI and the Mountain Park Hotel is pressed into service as an internment camp for over 2,000 German nationals, including Ruser and his men. This sudden collision of lives and cultures in the small town of Hot Springs, North Carolina is both frightening and exhilarating. And the unlikely alliance that forms between Hans Ruser and Stephen Robbins will force each to decide just how far they are willing to go to keep peace in the beautiful and isolated mountains. Feisty Anna Ulmann, seeking to assert her independence in a male-dominated world, mysteriously flees south to devote her life to documentary photography. When she steps off the train at the Hot Springs depot one sultry summer day, she could not have imagined the passionate journey that will result when she matches wits with Stephen Robbins. Haunted by demons both past and present, they will face heartbreaking tragedy. Yet together they will discover the true meaning of imprisonment and escape.

It All Turns on Affection

It All Turns on Affection
Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1619020971

An impassioned and rigorous appeal for reconnection to the land and human feeling by one of America’s most heartfelt and humble writers. When he accepted the invitation to deliver The Jefferson Lecture—our nation’s highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement—Wendell Berry decided to take on the obligation of thinking again about the problems that have engaged him throughout his long career. He wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork of the problems facing our nation and the earth itself, but in gaining hope from some examples of repair and healing even in these times of Late Capitalism and its destructive contagions. As a poet and writer he understood already that much can be gleaned from looking at the vocabulary of these problems themselves and how we describe them. And he settled on “affection” as a method of engagement and solution. The result is the greatest speech he has delivered in his six decades of public life. It All Turns on Affection will take its place alongside The Unsettling of America and The Gift of Good Land as major testaments to the power and clarity of his contribution to American thought. Also included are a small handful of other recent essays and a wonderful conversation between Mr. Berry, his wife Tanya Berry, and the head of the National Endowment of the Humanities Jim Leech, which took place just after the award was announced. The result offers a wonderful continuation of the long conversation Berry has had with his readers over many years and as well as a fine introduction to his life and work. “These powerful, challenging essays show why Berry’s vision of a sustainable, human–scaled society has proven so influential.” —Publishers Weekly “Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” —The Bloomsbury Review

The Visitor

The Visitor
Author: Maeve Brennan
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 49
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 161902652X

The current revival of the work of Maeve Brennan, who died in obscurity in 1993, has won her a reputation as a twentieth–century classic—one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce. Now, unexpectedly, Brennan's oeuvre is immeasurably deepened and broadened by a miraculous literary discovery—a short novel written in the mid–1940s, but till now unknown and unpublished. Recently found in a university archive, it is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temper. The Visitor is the haunting tale of Anastasia King, who, at the age of twenty–two, returns to her grandmother's house—the very house where she grew up—after six long years away. She has been in Paris, comforting her disgraced and dying mother, the runaway from a disastrous marriage to Anastasia's late father, the grandmother's only son. "It's a pity she sent for you." the grandmother says, smiling with anger. "And a pity you went after her. It broke your father's heart."Anastasia pays dearly for the choice she made, a choice that now costs her her own strong sense of family and makes her an exile—a visitor—in the place she once called home. Penelope Fitzgerald, writing of Brennan's story "The Springs of Affection," said that it carries an "electric charge of resentment and quiet satisfaction in revenge that chills you right through." The same can be said of the The Visitor, Maeve Brennan's "lost" novel—the early work of an incomparable master.

Objects of Our Affection

Objects of Our Affection
Author: Lisa Tracy
Publisher: Bantam Dell Publishing Group
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2010
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 0553807269

Recounts how the author and her sisters inherited furniture and other artifacts collected over the course of centuries by ancestors including several who served in the military, describing the stories behind various pieces of interest and what they revealed about past family members.