The Rose Garden: Short Stories

Maeve Brennan's collection The Springs of Affection was one of the best reviewed books of 1997. A volume of linked tales of the author's 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 fiction-much of it previously uncollected-is at last restored to print, and Maeve Brennan stands revealed as one of the century's great short-story writers.

In five of these twenty stories, we return to Brennan's Dublin, which like Joyce's is a place of paralyzed souls, unexpressed love, and scaldingly wicked humor. Another group of stories-a satirical study of Herbert's Retreat, a snug and smug community just up the Hudson River from New York-concerns 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 dog-a female black Lab, to be exact-who 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."