I. An Introduction: Voices from the Margins
There is a particular kind of writer who works at the edges of the American literary establishment—not in exile from it, not in opposition to it, but in a parallel current that runs quieter, deeper, and largely unnoticed by the apparatus of major publishing. These are writers whose books do not arrive heralded by six-figure advances or coast-to-coast publicity tours, whose names do not appear on the shortlists that dominate autumn literary conversation, but whose work, taken whole, is worth a closer look. James Mulhern's fiction sits in that current. His work—spanning novels, short story collections, poetry, and a novelette praised by The Missouri Review for its “well-written, complex characters, themes of the piece, and its fantastic voice”—is one small part of the Irish-American fiction written over the past two decades.
Mulhern is a Bostonian by origin, now based in the Philadelphia area, with a career that has threaded through the overlapping worlds of creative writing, literary editing, and education for more than a quarter century. Some background: a BFA with honors and an MFA from Emerson College, a fully funded Creative Writing Fellowship at Oxford University’s Exeter College in 2015, where he earned First Class Distinction. He has served on the editorial staffs of Ploughshares literary magazine and the American Heritage Dictionary (Third Edition), worked at an educational publisher in Boston and a law publishing house in New York City, and taught literature and creative writing at institutions ranging from Emerson College to Broward College, where he spent twelve years as adjunct faculty. His work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies more than 250 times. He donates the proceeds from his curriculum materials to a scholarship fund he established in his father’s name.
Alongside this output, Mulhern has had some recognition from readers and small-press reviewers, and less from the literary establishment at large. His 2019 novel Give Them Unquiet Dreams was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019 and received a Kirkus Star. He has won the Readers’ Favorite Book Award, been named a Notable Best Indie Book of 2019, earned a Red Ribbon (highly recommended) from The Wishing Shelf Book Awards in the United Kingdom, and seen two novels reach the finals of that same prize. He was a Finalist for the Tuscany Prize in Catholic Fiction in 2013, longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize in 2015, nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017, shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award for poetry in 2020/2021, shortlisted for the InkTears Annual Short Story Contest in 2016, and received two Honorable Mentions for the Short Story America Prize in 2015. It is, at minimum, a steady record of work, built over time without much attention from the literary marketplace.
What follows is an attempt to read that body of work within the rich and contested tradition of Irish-American fiction, and to note that the mid-list, the literary margins, and the small-press ecosystem sometimes hold work worth a second look.
II. The Irish-American Literary Tradition: A Map of the Territory
To understand what Mulhern is doing, one must first understand the literary landscape he inhabits—and complicates. Irish-American fiction is one of the great sub-traditions of American literature, a current that runs from James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy and Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah through Mary Doyle Curran’s The Parish and the Hill and Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood to Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, William Kennedy’s Albany cycle, Alice McDermott’s luminous chronicles of Queens and Brooklyn Irish families, Pete Hamill’s journalism-fiction blend, and Colum McCann’s expansive National Book Award–winning Let the Great World Spin. Elizabeth Cullinan’s Yellow Roses and J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man stake out further coordinates on this map.
What unites these writers, despite their considerable differences, is a shared thematic territory: Catholic faith and doubt as organizing principles of consciousness; immigrant memory as a living, haunting force rather than a settled historical fact; the family as both battleground and sanctuary; working-class dignity asserted against institutional cruelty; and the tension between assimilation into the American mainstream and fidelity to a heritage that refuses to be left at Ellis Island. Several of these writers—Kennedy most explicitly, McCourt most memorably—have also trafficked in the supernatural or the hallucinatory: ghosts walk through Kennedy’s Albany, ancestral voices murmur through McCourt’s Limerick, and the boundary between the living and the dead proves far more permeable than secular rationalism would allow.
It is precisely in this territory—where Catholic ritual meets family dysfunction, where ancestral ghosts materialize in working-class kitchens, where the emigrant’s grief transmutes into a child’s second sight—that James Mulhern has staked his claim. His Boston is not Kennedy’s Albany or McDermott’s Brooklyn, but it shares with those fictional geographies a quality of being simultaneously real and mythic, a place where history lives in the present tense and the dead have as much to say as the living.
III. “A Luminous, Beautifully Told Fairy Tale”: Give Them Unquiet Dreams
Give Them Unquiet Dreams (2019, Kurti Publishing) is Mulhern’s most acclaimed work, and it represents the fullest expression of his literary sensibility. The novel is a coming-of-age story set in 1970s Boston, centered on fourteen-year-old Aiden Glencar, a boy gifted—or cursed—with “second sight,” the ability to communicate with dead relatives. The central dramatic engine is Aiden’s fight to free his mother from a psychiatric institution, a struggle that pits the fragile resources of childhood against the indifferent machinery of institutional authority.
Kirkus Reviews, in awarding the novel its coveted Star designation and naming it a Best Book of 2019, called it “a luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.” The review praised Mulhern’s prose for “delivering readers a sense of the child in Aiden’s voice and a thorough, descriptive view of the world around him,” noting that “the writing is elevated by a liberal use of quotes and sayings ranging from Bible verses to Thoreau and Yeats, grounding the various players’ cultural context.” But the review reserved its highest praise for the novel’s human architecture: “Ultimately, it’s the rich characters who bring the novel to its greatest heights, as Aiden’s uncertainty, Martin’s protectiveness, their grandmother’s determination, and their mother’s wistfulness and grief make this a story about family and history and give the sense that everything and everyone are connected across time, whether or not those ties are immediately perceived.”
That final observation—about connection across time, about ties that may not be immediately perceived—goes to the heart of Mulhern’s project. His fiction insists on a world in which the past is never past, in which the dead maintain an active interest in the living, and in which what might appear, to a clinician, as mental illness is better understood as a form of gifted inheritance. This is not magical realism in the Latin American tradition of García Márquez or Isabel Allende, where the supernatural erupts into an otherwise rational world to dazzling, destabilizing effect. It is something more culturally specific: a supernatural realism rooted in Irish-Catholic folklore and family dynamics, in which ghosts appear not as metaphors but as participants in the ongoing drama of family life.
“Second sight is something that has been in your family for years. Your grandmother’s mother possessed it, and she, too, was demonized… There are always people who are blind to the gifts in others.”
This passage, from the linked story “Blindfolded,” which shares Aiden’s world, captures the essential move of Mulhern’s supernatural realism. What the institutions would pathologize, the family tradition affirms. What the modern world would medicate, the old world would honor. The grandmother who explains second sight to Aiden is not superstitious or deluded; she is the custodian of an alternative epistemology, one that values intuition, connection, and spiritual perception over the clinical detachment of psychiatric authority. In Mulhern’s hands, the supernatural is not an escape from reality but a deeper engagement with it—a way of insisting that the visible world is not the whole world, and that the connections between generations are not merely genetic but spiritual.
The novel’s 1970s Boston setting is rendered with sensory precision and cultural specificity. This is a world of Catholic parishes and public schools, of kitchen-table conversations conducted in the idiom of Irish immigrants one or two generations removed from the crossing. Mulhern captures the textures of working-class Irish-Catholic life with a fidelity that recalls the ethnographic richness of Farrell’s Chicago or Kennedy’s Albany, but filtered through a child’s perception that makes everything shimmer with wonder and dread in equal measure.
IV. The Dark Comic Vision: Molly Bonamici and the Short Fiction
If Give Them Unquiet Dreams represents the lyrical, elegiac mode of Mulhern’s fiction, Molly Bonamici (2016) reveals his darker, more comedic register. The novel follows Molly, a skeptical teenage girl deemed an “Angel of Death” by a faith healer—a designation that would be terrifying if Molly weren’t so magnificently unimpressed by it. The book tracks her life from 1980s Boston through adulthood as a high school English teacher, a trajectory that allows Mulhern to explore his perennial themes of faith and doubt, family and loss, through a protagonist whose default mode is sardonic detachment.
Kirkus Reviews noted that “a gleefully and wonderfully odd protagonist eases readers into a bare-bones plot,” observing that “Molly’s apathy toward death isn’t as strange as other characters think, more a curiosity than an obsession. This is likewise true for her religious views; Molly doesn’t reject religion but continually (and interestingly) questions it.” The review acknowledged that “Mulhern’s narrative hits the occasional standstill, where Molly repeatedly ponders the same issues with Nonna or Gabe”—a fair criticism that points to a tendency in Mulhern’s work toward recursive meditation that can slow narrative momentum. But it concluded that “while she may have a cold exterior, her distinctiveness is an appealing quality and often amusing.”
Amusing is, perhaps, an understatement. Consider the moment when Molly, discussing a dead body, tells a store clerk: “Maggots are a good source of protein… Do you sell word processors?” The juxtaposition is pure Mulhern—the macabre and the mundane colliding in a single breath, the horror of death deflated by the practical demands of living. This is comedy in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor, where grotesque physical reality and spiritual aspiration coexist in the same sentence, and where characters are rendered in exaggerated detail yet insist, against all odds, on their dignity and their right to grace, however ambiguous that grace may be.
In an interview with Shelf Unbound, Mulhern explained that “Molly is a derivative of Moll, from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders… I was inspired by her character.” But he also revealed the deeper autobiographical source: “The true genesis of Molly is the fact that five important people in my own life died in less than a year.” This confession illuminates the novel’s strange emotional logic: Molly’s detachment from death is not coldness but self-preservation, not apathy but a coping mechanism forged in the crucible of overwhelming loss. The comedy is not a denial of grief but a response to it—a way of surviving what might otherwise be unsurvivable.
Readers’ Favorite praised the novel for its “strong, colorful characters,” and this is indeed one of Mulhern’s signature gifts. Whether in his novels or his short fiction, he creates people who feel lived-in, whose voices carry the weight of specific histories and specific neighborhoods. His characters are not types; they are individuals, each with their own idiom, their own wounds, their own strategies for getting through the day.
This gift is on full display in his story collections. Assumptions and Other Stories (2016) drew praise from Readers’ Favorite for “that sly, quirky style of Mr. Mulhern’s that slides from the humorous to the macabre at the turn of a page,” with the reviewer going so far as to assert that “Mr. Mulhern’s writing displays all of the storytelling prowess of the contemporary Irish masters.” Blindfolded and Other Stories (2020) extends this achievement across pieces including “Blindfolded,” “Peppermint Candy,” “The Wrong Way,” “A Bath,” “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and “Chrysler”—a range of titles that suggests the tonal variety of the collection, moving from the ominous to the sweetly nostalgic to the darkly ironic.
The Weight of Small Mercies is a linked collection of five stories tracing young Aiden’s coming-of-age amid family trauma in working-class Irish-Catholic Boston, and About Aiden: Selected Stories gathers further narratives centered on the character who has become, across Mulhern’s oeuvre, something close to an alter ego—a recurring consciousness through which the author refracts his deepest concerns about family, faith, perception, and survival.
V. Close Readings: The Architecture of Epiphany
The best way to understand a writer’s achievement is to read closely, to slow down where the prose rewards attention. Mulhern’s fiction operates through what might be called an epiphanic architecture—a structure borrowed, consciously or not, from James Joyce’s Dubliners, in which carefully constructed narratives move toward moments of sudden illumination, often ambiguous, often painful, always resonant. Critics have compared Mulhern’s story “Assumptions” to Joyce’s “Araby”—a “Boston Araby,” in effect—in its portrait of a young consciousness confronting the gap between romantic expectation and disillusioning reality within a specific Catholic urban milieu.
But if Joyce is one antecedent, Flannery O’Connor is another. Mulhern shares with O’Connor a fascination with the Catholic grotesque—characters rendered in grotesque physical detail who nevertheless insist on their dignity and their need for grace. And like O’Connor, Mulhern understands that comedy and spiritual seriousness are not opposites but companions, that laughter can be a form of prayer and that the most profound truths sometimes arrive in the most absurd packaging.
A third comparison—and perhaps the most illuminating—is with William Trevor, the Irish master of the short story whose quiet tragedies of the marginalized and overlooked represent one of the high points of twentieth-century fiction in English. Like Trevor, Mulhern is drawn to characters whom the world has passed by or pushed aside: the mentally ill mother, the child burdened with unwanted perception, the immigrant grandmother clinging to old-world beliefs in a new-world setting. Like Trevor, he treats these characters with an unflinching tenderness that refuses to sentimentalize their suffering even as it insists on their humanity.
Consider the grandmother in the “Blindfolded” stories, who steals a chalice from a church in a desperate attempt to heal her institutionalized daughter:
“I’m going to return it, sweetheart. We’re just borrowing the chalice to make your mother well again. I think God will understand.”
The passage does a lot in few words. The grandmother’s theft is simultaneously an act of faith and an act of desperation, a belief in the magical power of sacred objects and an acknowledgment that conventional channels—medicine, prayer, institutional authority—have failed. Her reassurance to the child that “God will understand” is both a statement of genuine belief and a rationalization, a moment of spiritual confidence and a confession of helplessness. The sentence trembles between comedy and pathos, between the absurdity of the act and the depth of the love that motivates it — precise, layered, and sympathetic to the resourcefulness of ordinary people in hard circumstances.
Or consider this passage about the grandfather’s ghost, quoting Thoreau:
“‘Goodness is the only investment that never fails.’ A smart man by the name of Toreau said that.”
The misspelling of Thoreau’s name—“Toreau”—does real work as characterization. It tells us that the grandfather is a man of limited formal education who has nevertheless absorbed wisdom from sources far beyond his station; that his engagement with American literature is genuine but approximate, filtered through the oral tradition of immigrant culture rather than the academic precision of the university; and that his authority as a moral guide derives not from scholarly credentials but from lived experience and innate goodness. The ghost does not quote Thoreau to impress; he quotes him because the sentiment is true, and because in Mulhern’s fictional universe, truth can arrive from any quarter—from the living or the dead, from the educated or the unlettered, from the sanctioned or the marginalized.
The passage about Irish immigration achieves a similar compression of emotional and historical meaning:
“My grandmother and he, though they did not know each other, emigrated from different parts of Ireland in the late 1930s. With hope in their hearts, just a few belongings, I’m sure, and not much money, they journeyed to the promised land of their imaginations.”
That final phrase—“the promised land of their imaginations”—is quietly devastating. It acknowledges that America was always partly a fiction to its immigrants, a story they told themselves to justify the rupture of emigration. But it does not dismiss that fiction; it honors it, recognizing that the capacity to imagine a better life is itself a form of courage, and that the gap between the imagined promise and the actual reality is the space in which the immigrant experience—and much of Mulhern’s fiction—unfolds.
VI. The Thematic Architecture: Six Pillars
Across his novels, stories, and poetry, Mulhern’s work is organized around a set of recurring themes that constitute something close to an obsession—the productive, generative kind of obsession that gives a body of work its coherence and its power.
Second Sight and Supernatural Realism. The most distinctive feature of Mulhern’s fiction is its treatment of the supernatural not as genre convention but as cultural inheritance. Irish folklore—particularly the tradition of “second sight,” the ability to perceive the dead or to foresee future events—is woven subtly into his narratives, functioning not as a plot device but as a lens through which characters understand their place in the family and in history. What distinguishes Mulhern’s approach from pure magical realism is its grounding in the specific cultural matrix of Irish-Catholic Boston. The ghosts in his fiction are not symbolic or allegorical; they are family members, with opinions, memories, and agendas of their own. Mental illness, in this framework, is recast as gifted inheritance rather than pathology—a radical reimagining that has profound implications for how we think about neurodivergence, spiritual perception, and the boundaries of the “normal.”
Faith and Doubt. Mulhern’s characters do not reject religion; they interrogate it, endlessly and inconclusively. They move between belief and skepticism, sometimes within the space of a single paragraph, finding in Catholic ritual both comfort and confinement, both beauty and absurdity. In the Shelf Unbound interview, Mulhern described this dimension of his work with characteristic directness: “The existential search is within all of us. Why are we here? What is the point of life? What is God?… I was always asking questions, and I still am.” His characters—Aiden, Molly, the various narrators of his stories—are all askers of these questions, and the fiction derives much of its power from its refusal to provide neat answers.
Family as Fortress and Prison. The Irish-American family, in Mulhern’s rendering, is a contradictory institution: a source of identity, love, and protection, and also a site of dysfunction, coercion, and inherited trauma. His fictional families are populated by domineering grandmothers, absent fathers, committed mothers, and protective brothers—archetypes, perhaps, but rendered with enough specificity and dark humor to transcend their archetypal origins. The family is the crucible in which Mulhern’s characters are formed, and the cage from which they must, in some measure, escape in order to grow.
Coming of Age and Identity. The bildungsroman—the novel of growth and self-discovery—is the form to which Mulhern returns most frequently, and his coming-of-age narratives are distinguished by their willingness to address gay identity in the context of 1970s Catholic Boston, a setting in which such identity was not merely stigmatized but actively pathologized. Mulhern handles this material with a delicacy that avoids both melodrama and didacticism, presenting his young protagonists’ sexual awakening as one strand in a larger tapestry of self-discovery that also includes spiritual questioning, intellectual growth, and the painful acquisition of moral autonomy.
The Ordinary as Sacred. One of the most striking features of Mulhern’s prose is its ability to invest small, everyday acts with profound emotional and spiritual significance. Tea. Rescuing a dog. Stealing a chalice. These are the moments around which his narratives crystallize—moments of what might be called transcendence in the ordinary, when the mundane suddenly reveals itself as saturated with meaning. This is a sacramental vision of the world, rooted in the Catholic sensibility that informs all of Mulhern’s work: the belief that grace operates not through spectacular miracles but through the texture of daily life, through gestures of love and stubbornness and improvised faith.
Irish-American Diaspora Memory. Running beneath all of Mulhern’s other themes is a deep preoccupation with the dynamics of diaspora—with emigration, inherited trauma, generational curses and redemptions, and the persistence of Old World belief in New World settings. His characters carry Ireland within them like a phantom limb, feeling its presence most acutely in moments of crisis or revelation. The “promised land of their imaginations” that drew their grandparents across the Atlantic remains, for Mulhern’s characters, both a source of strength and a burden—a heritage that enriches their inner lives even as it complicates their relationship with the American present.
VII. The Poet’s Voice: Narrative Lyric and the Grammar of Grief
Mulhern’s fiction has received the bulk of critical attention, but his poetry constitutes a significant and complementary body of work. His poems have appeared in publications including Impspired, The Galway Review, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and Trouvaille Review, among others, and his poem “Copacetic” was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in 2020/2021—a recognition that places his poetry alongside his fiction as work of serious literary ambition.
Mulhern’s poetry is best described as narrative-lyric: poems that tell stories, or fragments of stories, in language that aspires to the compression and musicality of lyric verse. His characteristic subjects are fathers, brothers, and emigrant ghosts—the same human landscape that populates his fiction, rendered here in more concentrated form. Key poems include “Copacetic,” “Leaves,” “The Crosswalk,” “Brother,” and “Longing”—titles that suggest the emotional territory: a yearning for balance and peace, a fascination with thresholds and crossings, a deep engagement with sibling bonds and the ache of loss.
What the poetry shares with the fiction is a commitment to clarity and emotional directness. Mulhern is not an experimental poet; he does not traffic in opacity or fragmentation for its own sake. His poems seek to communicate—to tell the reader something true about grief, about family, about the strange persistence of love across time and distance. In this, he aligns with the mainstream tradition of narrative poetry, where the poem’s primary obligation is to the human experience it renders rather than to the formal innovations of the avant-garde.
Taken together with his fiction, the poetry reveals a writer whose central concern—across all genres and forms—is the mapping of human connection: between the living and the dead, between the Old World and the New, between the self and the family that shaped it. The poetry distills what the fiction elaborates, and the fiction provides the expansive context that the poetry implies. They are complementary enterprises, each illuminating the other.
VIII. On Craft: Voice, Character, and the Art of Letting Characters Speak
In the Shelf Unbound interview, Mulhern offered a statement of artistic principle that serves as a key to his entire body of work: “If I am writing fiction, the starting point is always a character. The next most important aspect of writing a story is the voice of that character. Many writers have said this before, but it is true: The characters will write the story for you if you let them speak.” This deceptively simple credo—character first, voice second, plot as a consequence of both—explains much about Mulhern’s strengths and, to be fair, some of his limitations.
There are real strengths here. The characters in his fiction are vividly realized, each with a distinctive voice, a specific way of seeing the world, a particular set of verbal tics and emotional reflexes. Aiden’s uncertainty, his grandmother’s fierce determination, his mother’s wistful grief, Molly Bonamici’s sardonic detachment—these are not character sketches but fully inhabited consciousnesses, rendered with the kind of patient, accumulative detail that makes fiction feel like life. Mulhern’s prose style—described by critics as “lyrical supernatural realism infused with Irish-Catholic folklore, blending vivid sensory details and authentic Boston-Irish dialogue with poignant family epiphanies”—is the instrument through which these characters come alive, and it is a flexible, responsive instrument, capable of shifting from elegiac lyricism to sharp comedy within a single paragraph.
His approach to voice is especially noteworthy. The Boston-Irish dialogue in his fiction has the ring of authenticity—not the self-conscious, overly phonetic rendering that can make literary dialect feel condescending, but a subtler music of syntax and idiom that captures the way a particular community actually speaks. When Mulhern’s characters talk, they sound like themselves, not like a writer’s idea of what Irish-American working-class people should sound like. This is a crucial distinction, and it separates Mulhern’s work from much of the sentimental Irish-American fiction that trades in blarney and begorra stereotypes.
The limitation—and it would be dishonest not to acknowledge it—is that a character-first approach can sometimes produce narratives that feel episodic rather than architecturally unified, sequences of vivid scenes connected by association and emotional logic rather than by the kind of tight causal plotting that gives certain novels their irresistible forward momentum. Kirkus Reviews noted this tendency in Molly Bonamici, observing that “Mulhern’s narrative hits the occasional standstill, where Molly repeatedly ponders the same issues.” This is a fair observation, and it applies, to varying degrees, across Mulhern’s oeuvre. His fiction is stronger in the scene than in the arc, more compelling in the moment of revelation than in the machinery that connects one revelation to the next.
But this is a limitation shared by many writers whose primary gifts are for voice and character rather than for plot—writers like William Trevor, Alice Munro, and, indeed, James Joyce, whose Dubliners stories are masterpieces of the epiphanic moment rather than models of narrative propulsion. The question is whether the moments are good enough to justify the architecture, and in Mulhern’s best work—the Aiden narratives, the strongest stories in Assumptions and Blindfolded, the most acclaimed passages of Give Them Unquiet Dreams—they emphatically are.
Mulhern himself has reflected on the existential dimension of his creative practice: “Any work of art enlarges our consciousness. We become wiser by ‘digging deep’ as we create.” This is not mere platitude. It is a description of a writer’s method—a belief that the act of writing is itself a form of inquiry, a way of discovering what one knows and believes, and that the writer’s primary obligation is not to entertain (though Mulhern’s fiction is frequently entertaining) but to illuminate, to make the reader see more clearly the connections—between people, between generations, between the living and the dead—that constitute the fabric of human experience.
IX. The Teacher-Writer: Pedagogy and the Literary Life
No account of Mulhern’s literary life would be complete without acknowledging the role of teaching in his creative formation. His career spans more than twenty-six years of classroom instruction—at Emerson College, Broward College, Atlantic Technical College, in high school settings, and teaching Advanced Placement courses. He is the author of How to Analyze Literature (Second Edition), Teaching Literature Creatively, and various AP English analysis guides and curriculum materials.
There is a long and honorable tradition of the teacher-writer in American letters—from Flannery O’Connor at Iowa to Raymond Carver at Syracuse, from Tobias Wolff at Stanford to Toni Morrison at Princeton. Teaching, for these writers, was not a distraction from their creative work but a complement to it, a way of staying in daily contact with the craft of writing and the challenge of articulating what makes fiction and poetry work. Mulhern belongs to this tradition, and his educational writing—particularly the curriculum materials whose proceeds he donates entirely to his father’s scholarship fund—suggests a writer for whom the transmission of literary knowledge is not merely a professional obligation but a vocation, a calling as serious as the writing itself.
His editorial experience—at Ploughshares, at the American Heritage Dictionary, at publishing houses in Boston and New York—has also shaped his sensibility. A writer who has spent time on the other side of the editorial desk, reading submissions and making judgments about what works and what does not, brings to his own writing a self-critical awareness that is often visible in the precision of Mulhern’s prose, in his attention to the individual sentence, in his unwillingness to settle for the approximately right word when the exactly right word is available.
X. The Indie Path: Small Presses and the Question of Literary Value
Mulhern’s career raises, in pointed form, one of the most important questions in contemporary American literature: does the path of publication determine the value of the work? The American literary establishment has long operated on the assumption that serious literature is published by major houses, reviewed in major outlets, and validated by major prizes. Writers who publish with small or independent presses—no matter how talented, how prolific, or how well-reviewed—are often consigned to a shadow canon, visible to devoted readers and specialized reviewers but invisible to the broader literary culture.
Mulhern’s case challenges this assumption. His work has been published by Kurti Publishing and other small presses, and it has received the kind of critical attention—Kirkus Stars, Best Book designations, award nominations and wins in the United States and the United Kingdom—that suggests genuine literary merit rather than mere commercial viability. His more than 250 publications in literary journals and anthologies (a partial list appears on the Books page) reflect work that has been accepted, over many years, by editors at a wide range of outlets.
What can be said is that Mulhern’s body of work—taken whole and read carefully—is the work of a serious, committed writer.
XI. Conclusion: A Place in Contemporary Letters
James Mulhern is not a famous writer, nor a best-selling one, nor a prize-winning writer in the sense that the major American literary prizes confer fame and fortune. He is a writer who has spent decades working steadily at his craft, trying to write with intelligence, empathy, dark humor, and a certain spiritual seriousness.
His best work—Give Them Unquiet Dreams, the Aiden stories, the strongest pieces in Assumptions and Blindfolded—works in a recognizably Irish-American vein: family as both fortress and prison, the ordinary treated as sacred, the dead persisting among the living. His prose style, a lyrical supernatural realism infused with Irish-Catholic folklore, is distinctive. The themes are old and common ones in serious fiction, handled here with as much care as he could give them.
In the Shelf Unbound interview, Mulhern said: “The existential search is within all of us. Why are we here? What is the point of life? What is God?… I was always asking questions, and I still am.” It is this restless, unresolved questioning—conducted not in the abstract but through the lives of specific, vividly realized characters in specific, carefully rendered settings—that gives Mulhern’s work its particular power and its claim on our attention.
The literary world is vast, and its attention is finite. But the books themselves are there, for anyone who wants them—Aiden’s second sight and his grandmother’s stolen chalice, Molly’s mordant wit and her refusal to be impressed by death, the emigrant ghosts who quote Thoreau with loving imprecision.
This essay draws on reviews published by Kirkus Reviews, Readers’ Favorite, and The Missouri Review; an interview published by Shelf Unbound; and biographical and bibliographic information from the author’s published works and public biographical record. All quoted material is attributed inline to its original source. An original critical essay written for this site by Silver Current Press — not previously published elsewhere and not affiliated with, reviewed by, or published in The New York Times.