The Catalog
Novels, novellas, short story collections, poetry, and nonfiction — most published by Silver Current Press in Philadelphia. Every cover links to its Amazon page.
Novel · 2019 · Kirkus Starred Review
A novel about the haunted territory of family — what we inherit, what we conceal, and what eventually surfaces in the slow weather of memory. Set in 1970s Irish Catholic Boston and told in the patient, deliberate sentences for which Mulhern has become known.
"A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)View on Amazon
The Full Catalog
Novels, story collections, poetry, and nonfiction — spanning more than two decades of literary work and more than three hundred journal and anthology appearances.
Novel · 2016
A literary coming-of-age novel set in Italian-American Boston — featuring a strong female protagonist whose spirit Mulhern traces to Defoe's Moll Flanders. Kirkus-reviewed, Readers' Favorite recognized.
Story Collection
Short fiction in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor, James Joyce, and Edgar Allan Poe — interior, observed, with the "storytelling prowess of the contemporary Irish masters" (Readers' Favorite).
Novella · 2016
A spare, lyrical novella praised by The Missouri Review for its "well-written, complex characters" and "fantastic voice." A Wishing Shelf Red Ribbon Winner that "literally jumps off the page."
THE WEIGHT
OF SMALL
MERCIES
James Mulhern
Story Collection · Forthcoming
A new collection of short stories from Silver Current Press — about the quiet kindnesses that hold a life together, and the ones that almost did. Told in the patient, deliberate sentences for which Mulhern has become known.
MIA BAMBINA
& OTHER
STORIES
James Mulhern
Story Collection · Forthcoming
A new collection of short fiction — sharper-edged, atmospheric, and shadowed. The forthcoming Silver Current Press story collection, in paperback and hardcover.
HOW TO
ANALYZE
LITERATURE
Second Edition · J. Mulhern
Nonfiction · Textbook · Forthcoming
The second edition of Mulhern's textbook on close reading and literary analysis — a practical, voice-driven guide for college classrooms and serious readers alike.
Poetry · 2020
A collection of poetry from a writer shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and nominated for Best of the Net — work published widely across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland.
Selected Appearances
Work by James Mulhern has appeared in international literary journals and anthologies more than three hundred times. A selection of the most notable volumes follows. Starred entries (★) mark "best of" and signature collections.
Selected fiction and poetry has additionally appeared in The Missouri Review, The Galway Review, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Fragmented Voices, and many other journals.
From the Reviewers
Selected passages from the press, with a brief editorial gloss beside each — attending to matters of style, craft, subject, and the layering of themes.
“A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.”
Of the prose itself the reviewer writes that it “is strong, delivering readers a sense of the child in Aiden’s voice and a thorough, descriptive view of the world around him,” and praises “a liberal use of quotes and sayings ranging from Bible verses to Thoreau and Yeats, grounding the various players’ cultural context.” The notice closes on the book’s emotional architecture: “the rich characters who bring the novel to its greatest heights … give the sense that everything and everyone are connected across time, whether or not those ties are immediately perceived.”
Editor’s Note on the Review
Kirkus identifies the three pressures that hold this novel in tension: Irish Catholic inheritance, the Thoreauvian inward gaze, and a child’s second sight. What the reviewer calls a “fairy tale grounded in history” is the book’s central craft — folklore and 1970s Boston are not staged in turns but braided, so that grief, queer awakening, and the visible dead occupy the same sentence. The praise for Aiden’s voice points to the book’s deepest technical decision: a child narrator whose register is at once colloquial and quietly literary, capable of holding both a grandmother’s kleptomania and a line from Yeats without seam.
“A gleefully and wonderfully odd protagonist eases readers into a bare-bones plot.”
The reviewer reads Molly as a character of philosophical curiosity rather than dysfunction: “Molly’s apathy toward death isn’t as strange as other characters think, more a curiosity than an obsession,” and her religious posture is described as “continually (and interestingly) [questioning] it, like why would God allow horrible things to happen.” Even when the prose “hits the occasional standstill,” the notice grants that Molly’s “distinctiveness is an appealing quality and often amusing,” citing her now-much-quoted aside about maggots and word processors.
Editor’s Note on the Review
Kirkus has located the book’s real subject: the slow, half-comic theology of a woman who refuses both belief and unbelief and chooses instead to keep asking. The reviewer’s wariness about the “bare-bones plot” is, read another way, a notice of method: the novel is built less by event than by recurrence, returning Molly to the same questions across decades so that the reader feels time pass the way Molly does — through repetition rather than incident. The book belongs to a particular tradition of Catholic-haunted American comedy, and the review’s emphasis on voice is the right emphasis.
“James Mulhern did an excellent job of creating strong, colorful characters that lit up the page. There wasn’t a single clichéd or flat character among the plethora of people that Molly encountered.”
Phillips emphasizes the central figure herself — “a strong female character that wasn’t afraid to show her weakness or vulnerabilities” — and the larger thematic claim the novel makes through her: “Molly discovers that life is a giant mystery and no one is prepared for life’s twists and turns.” The review closes simply: “I found her refreshing and very likeable. A job well done.”
Editor’s Note on the Review
What this review names well is the book’s populated quality. Mulhern is a writer of crowds — faith healers, grandmothers, neighbours, drifters — and the novel’s mood depends on no single one of them being a type. Phillips’s recognition of Molly as vulnerable beneath her composure points to the book’s emotional layering: the supernatural premise (the Angel-of-Death pronouncement) is never allowed to override the realism of an ordinary girl learning that life will not be explained to her in advance.
Red Ribbon Winner · Highly Recommended by The Wishing Shelf Book Awards.
Give Them Unquiet Dreams was named a Finalist in the 2020 Wishing Shelf Book Awards and received the jury’s Red Ribbon — the “highly recommended” distinction reserved by the panel of British readers and book groups who serve as its judges.
Editor’s Note on the Award
The Wishing Shelf panel is composed of working readers and book clubs rather than trade critics, which makes its endorsement particular: it speaks to a novel’s readability and emotional traction in the hand. That a book so steeped in Irish folklore, Catholic guilt, and the second sight should carry to a British lay readership at all is itself a small statement about its reach — the regional textures hold across the Atlantic because the underlying questions (family, belief, the dead who will not leave) are not regional.
“Tales of grace and despair abound … the quieter scenes show the mind of a talented writer at work.”
The reviewer traces the early sequence of Molly-and-Nonna stories — the convent-gate robbery, the moral ambiguities — and notes that the collection is “influenced by writers such as Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce, and Edgar Allan Poe.” The praise lands on the muted register: “the quieter scenes show the mind of a talented writer at work.”
Editor’s Note on the Review
Kirkus correctly places this collection in the O’Connor lineage — the moral irony, the grotesque turned to grace — while also catching the Joycean inheritance: epiphany staged at low volume, almost in passing. The reviewer’s preference for “the quieter scenes” is a useful key to reading Mulhern at large: the louder set-pieces are not the work, only its weather. The work is the sentence-by-sentence attention to ordinary lives the rest of the culture has stopped noticing.
Reviews are quoted in part and linked in full to their original publications.
In the Press
"A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit."
— Kirkus Reviews · Starred
