From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote for "The New Yorker" s Talk of the Town department under the pen name The Long-Winded Lady. Her unforgettable sketchesprose snapshots of life in small restaurants, cheap hotels, and crowded streets of Times Square and the Villagetogether 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 Long-Winded Lady" is a celebration of one of "The New Yorker" s finest writers."