Publisher's Synopsis
Maeve Brennans collection The Springs of Affection was one of the best reviewed books of 1997. A volume of linked tales of the authors native Dublin, it enlarged the reputation of a too-often overlooked writer, a Flaubertian perfectionist revered by her New Yorker colleagues as one of the finest stylists the magazine ever produced.Now, with The Rose Garden , the remainder of her fictionmuch of it previously uncollectedis at last restored to print, and Maeve Brennan stands revealed as one of the centurys great short-story writers.In five of these twenty stories, we return to Brennans Dublin, which like Joyces is a place of paralyzed souls, unexpressed love, and scaldingly wicked humor. Another group of storiesa satirical study of Herberts Retreat, a snug and smug community just up the Hudson River from New Yorkconcerns the Irish in America, the hired help of a set of money-conscious, social-climbing suburbanites. Still others take us into the cheap hotels and inexpensive restaurants of Times Square and Greenwich Village, and into the mind of Bluebell, an aging city doga female black Lab, to be exactwho lives on her memories of the country and the seashore.;Together they form a collection that, as The New York Times Book Review said of The Springs of Affection , is wide-ranging, savage, and poignant, and that brings Brennan back to the table of modern fiction, where her place has been empty for too long.
