Yellow Roses
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One of SLATE Magazine's 15 Best Literary Rediscoveries of 2024
A captivating collection unveiling the intricacies of love, life, and legacy
These twelve stories, told from the viewpoint of young women in life’s mid-passage, explore the splendors and miseries of love, both carnal and spiritual, and cast back through sickness and health to the engraving experiences of childhood and forward to the rituals and release of death and its occasion for recall.
They tell us of a dutiful but not guiltless daughter faced with the wreckage a father has made of his life, of the pain of trying to steer steadily through a doomed affair with a dearly loved married man, and of the ironies attending the funeral of a priest uncle and the birthday of an aged mother.
From the outwardly unremarkable frame of a single day—on Fire Island or in New York—an entire life and an encompassment of humanity are movingly conveyed. Then, with inverted telescope, the most subjective of inner realms is explored—through a hospital stay, a sudden name change, or the surprising end of all those dreaded piano lessons.
Taken together, these stories are a far greater whole than the sum of their remarkable parts, an unforgettable exploration of the paradoxical toughness and vulnerability that define the mortal condition.
Involuted yet acute speculations, dialogue with cliches like welding studs, and a prose of sinuous ease—not to be missed.—Kirkus Reviews
The reissue of Elizabeth Cullinan’s short-story collection, Yellow Roses, marks her long-overdue return to the first rank of American writers. Her complex, richly drawn characters—aspiring writers, doomed lovers, ambivalent Jesuits—straddle the outer-borough world of ethno-religious certainties and the tumultuous possibilities of a culture and city caught up in revolutionary changes. The timeless quality of Cullinan’s writing—its immediacy and authenticity—elevates her storytelling into literature. Her honest, unsparing observations of her East Bronx, Irish-Catholic upbringing echo James Joyce’s achievement in the Dubliners. Yellow Roses is a cause for celebration.—Peter Quinn, author of Cross Bronx: A Writing Life
The return to print of Elizabeth Cullinan's Yellow Roses is a great gift to those of us who love the short story form. Place these eloquent, melancholy tales with their fraught humor and their tangled families, their complex emotional wisdom, beside the best of Anton Chekov or Frank O'Connor or Alice Munro and they will more than hold their own. Cullinan reminds us of how the writer's art can illuminate the ordinary moment, pierce the heart of the unspoken, transform dailiness into the stuff of revelation and grace.—Alice McDermott
Elizabeth Cullinan is a master of a style both vivid and austere, a vision that is decidedly female, searching always for large ideas, large meanings. She opened the door to an understanding of a cohort under represented in American literature: the Irish Catholic woman torn between her hungers and her sense of duty, finally unable to grasp what she desires.—Mary Gordon
Elizabeth Irene Cullinan (June 7, 1933–January 26, 2020) was an Irish–American writer who started her career as a typist at The New Yorker magazine, which published her stories from 1960 to 1981. She produced two short story collections, The Time of Adam and Yellow Roses, and two novels, House of Gold and A Change of Scene.
Angela Alaimo O'Donnell (Foreword By)
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is a professor, writer, and poet at Fordham University and the Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Among her recent books are Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith and Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor.
Introduction: In Praise of Resurrection
by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell | vii
Estelle | 1
The Sum and the Substance | 10
In the Summerhouse | 39
Yellow Roses | 62
An Accident | 73
A Foregone Conclusion | 87
The Voices of the Dead | 99
The Perfect Crime | 116
Only Human | 144
Life After Death | 164
A Story in the Key of C | 182
Dreaming | 191
