When The Springs of Affection was published in 1997, the poet Eamon Grennan called it a classic, a book that placed Maeve Brennan among the best Irish short-story writers since Joyce. The Rose Garden gathers the rest of her short fiction, some of it set in her native Dublin--a city, like Joyce's, of paralyzed souls and unexpressed love--but most of it in and around her adopted Manhattan, which she once called "the capsized city--half-capsized, anyway, with the inhabitants hanging on, most of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their life's predicament."

The riches here are many, but the collection's centerpiece is a suite of satirical scenes from suburban life, stories a little meaner than Cheever's, and wittier than Updike's (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Some of the stories are quietly tender, some ferociously satirical, some unique in their chilly emotional weather; all are Maeve Brennan at her incomparable best.