The Long-Winded Lady — Maeve Brennan

From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" department under the pen name "The Longâ€"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 Longâ€"Winded Lady is a celebration of one of The New Yorker's finest writers.