The long-winded lady by Maeve Brennan

From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote for The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column 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’.