During the 1950s and 1960s, Maeve Brennan contributed numerous vignettes to 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 the 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.” 

"Anyone familiar with New York will enjoy a transporting jolt of recognition from these pages. Looking back from our own time, when it seems that every column has to be loaded with hectoring opinion and egotistical preening, Brennan’s stylish scrutiny of minor embarrassments and small pleasures is as welcome as a Dry Martini.” —The Independent