Sinéad Gleeson

I'm calling from Dublin, which I think feels very apt given the subject of our conversation later in the show.

I'm delighted to be here.

I'm such a fan of this podcast, so thank you.

Well, only one really.

And titles are very tricky, as you know.

But I guess that that project itself was an act of sort of redivivus.

It was an act of reclamation.

And one of the writers I included was the wonderful Maeve Brennan, because she was the one among many women in Irish canonical terms that got overlooked, omitted, excluded and didn't have their brilliant work talked about with the same enthusiasm.

volume as a lot of her male contemporaries.

So I stole the line, The Long Gaze, back from a wonderful novella called The Visitor by an Irish writer called Maeve Brennan, who was one of my favorite Irish writers and somebody, one of those writers I try and press on people all the time if they haven't heard of her, because I think there's only a small body of work, a couple of short story collections, one novella and a collection of nonfiction.

And that's it.

There was no novel, there were no plays.

So there's enough to be able to get through quite quickly.

But if people haven't heard of her, I love telling people to read Mae Brennan.

We're all busy, aren't we?

I have quite a while ago.

And you're dead right, it is very funny because I think it was pitched as quite an academic book and yet it's very humorous.

But it was extremely groundbreaking, as you say, to frame the title with the question.

But it's really striking to me, particularly at the moment, how many books have come out very close together.

You've Katie Hessel's book, you know, The Story of Art Without Men.