Yellow Roses

Elizabeth Cullinan (Author) 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

Involuted yet acute speculations, dialogue with cliches like welding studs, and a prose of sinuous ease--not to be missed.-- "Kirkus Reviews" 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 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