Reflected in these writings from twenty-one Irish Americans are the themes common to all immigrant literature, but from the authors' own ethnic point of view. The struggle for success forms the underlying structure in the stories by O'Hara, Curran, and McCarthy; and the changing values the New World imposes on the individual are seen in Edwin O'Connor's Grand Day for Mr. Garvey. Irish wit and black humor pepper all the stories, as represented by Dunn's bartender-philosopher, Dooley, and Donleavy's Fairy Tale of New York. Catholicism is omnipresent and is often characterized by the priest, as in Fitzgerald's Benediction, Power's Bill, and Flaherty's Fogarty. Themes that have an immense effect on the characters' relationships are their difficulties in communicating with one another, which Gill captures succinctly in The Cemetery, and the repositioning of gender roles, so evident in Cullinan's Life After Death and in Costello's Murphy's Xmas. Finally, there are the intense, often contradictory, feelings the characters have toward their "homeland:" Hamill's Gift illustrates the desire to rid Ireland of British rule; Gordon's "neighborhood" shows the immigrants' embarrassment over their origins. Editors Casey and Rhodes have organized these pieces chronologically, beginning at the turn of the century. Thus, the selections illustrate the progression of Irish-American literature and also fulfill the word of William Kennedy, who said of his own writing: "those who came before helped to show me how to turn experience into literature."

With this collection of some of English-language short stories of the past half century, the reader is invited to see Ireland afresh from the perspective of its women writers. Included are stories by well-known writers such as Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien and Julia O'Faolain. The collection also includes new writers, such as Clare Boylan, Rita Kelly, and Una Woods. The stories focus on the inherrent contradictions of provincial Ireland's role as a modern European state. In the first story, Helen Lucy Burke writes of an older Irish woman, encountering the shocking realities of Italian Catholic Rome. Other stories provide interesting revisions of traditional Irish themes and situations, such as the problems of an educated, sensitive person stuck in a country town. Anne Devlin handles the themes of the Irish person in England, this time in an England edgy about IRA bombings. Some stories deal with the ""Troubles"" in Northern Ireland; others deal with the eternal troubles of Ireland as a whole too many children, too much hypocrisy, too little communication between men and women. The editors have provided an introduction which examines the role of women, especially women writers, in Irish history and literature.