“She was getting what she called ‘nervous’ and she couldn't understand it, because she had been looking forward to Christmas.” Listen to Roddy Doyle reading Maeve Brennan’s Dublin-set story “Christmas Eve”, first published in the New Yorker in December 1972 https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/roddy-doyle-reads-maeve-brennan #MaeveBrennan #RoddyDoyle #Dublin #Christmas #NewYorker #podcast

New newsletter with lots of recommendations: including #TheHorror Show at #SomersetHouse (pic I'm Dead by #DavidShrigley), Broccoli by #MaeveBrennan, some books of the year, #MakingModernism at #RoyalAcademy, BBC #Ghoststories, a new @strands track for #Crashensemble’s Reactions, #AliceMaher, #PoetryDetectives #AmyKey #KatLister #Artle and info on #NollaignamBan at the #IrishWritersCentre on January 6th (will be reading a bit from the new book). Subscribe here: https://momentsofrecognition.substack.com/p/on-horror-objects-recurrences

What Frank McNally may not realise is that the "Biddy" or "Bridget" stereotype was still in full flow when #MaeveBrennan used it in the mid-20th century

Sunday listening: #RoddyDoyle (whose mother was Maeve’s cousin) reads and discusses Brennan’s story Christmas Eve on the #TheNewYorker #Fiction podcast.

🎧: https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/roddy-doyle-reads-maeve-brennan

Listen back to this week’s #Backlisted on Brennan’s life and work in the link above.

#MaeveBrennan #IrishWriting #IrishWriters @backlistedpod

“You are all your work has… A good way to remain on guard is to go to the window and watch the birds for an hour or two or three.”

From a letter from #MaeveBrennan to her friend, the writer Tillie Olsen, which Olsen kept pinned above her desk.

@seventydys and I discuss Brennan’s life and work on the latest #Backlisted podcast.

🎧 https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/174

One of my favourite #IrishWriters is #MaeveBrennan, who wrote ferocious, heart-stopping stories of Dublin, and superb columns for The New Yorker. Hugely forgotten after her death, there’s been a slow revival.

Brennan captures toxic relationships, unfulfilled lives & the unheimlich nature of domestic spaces; Her Long Winded Lady columns weave strangers’ lives and the psychogeography of NYC in eloquent prose.

David Hayden & I discuss her work on the latest Backlisted

🎧: https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/174