Essays

How a single scriptural phrase for damnation becomes, in James Mulhern’s fiction, the shimmer over a baptism.

Tears, rain, tide pools, and the unglamorous water of the sickroom — the element that carries mercy through Mulhern’s fiction and verse.

Why the holy in James Mulhern’s work always arrives disguised as the ordinary — a housedress, a bottle of suntan oil, a classroom of restless teenagers.

Reading “Assumptions” against the Catholic dogma of the Assumption — and asking what it means to grant a flawed, ordinary body the imagery reserved for the sinless one.

The architecture of mercy across all eight stories — themes, motifs, character archetypes, allusion, and craft, with close reading and direct quotation throughout.

A sacrament administered without a priest — through a classroom, a pelican, a family beach trip, and a poem written for the dead.

Notes on attention, revision, and the belief that a sentence, closely enough watched, will tell you what it is for.

A statement of belief in five movements — on the sacred in ordinary life, mercy as a method of composition, and the conviction that we are mended only in the act of mending others.

Themes, tropes, and religious imagery across the poetry of James Mulhern, tracing water, touch, and light as a recurring inherited vocabulary.

Allusion and subtext in Molly Bonamici — how the novel argues with Fitzgerald’s Gatsby even as it borrows from him.

A full-length evaluation of Mulhern’s fiction, poetry, and literary achievement, read within the Irish-American tradition alongside Farrell, Kennedy, McDermott, and Trevor.

Four short essays reading Mulhern’s poetry and fiction alongside James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver.

The repeated motifs — the threshold, the hand, water, the slant of light, the household object — read as a compositional system, with close attention to craft, purpose, theme, and technique.

Permeability, recurrence, and the poetics of the unfinished — reading Hartmann’s boundary research against Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Bergson, with the counter-evidence stated.

On the sacrament hiding inside the sentence — between writer and subject, page and reader, the living and the dead.

How affect withheld, rather than perception failed, produces the distinctive unreliable narration of Molly Bonamici and Give Them Unquiet Dreams.

Unauthorized confessors in Mulhern’s fiction — grandmothers, children, and a Public Garden absolution granted decades after the fact.

The genetic evidence inside Mulhern’s collected work — a bath scene redrafted from poem to story, and a jetty passage duplicated within a single collection.

How Aiden Glencar’s second sight in Give Them Unquiet Dreams solves problems of foreshadowing, temporal compression, and point of view.

Mulhern, O’Connor, and Synge — on the tonal hairpin turn from comedy to violence, and what it costs a reader to laugh at the wrong moment.

A social realist reading of the Irish-Catholic and Italian-American neighborhoods — Jamaica Plain, Braintree, Revere — that make up Mulhern’s coherent fictional map.

Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and the Oversoul — how a nineteenth-century American philosophy structures a contemporary Irish-Catholic and Italian-American fictional world.

Charlatans, healers, and con artists — Lady Jane and Myra Bocca, read against the American literary tradition of the confidence woman.

Reading “A Bath” against the family elegy tradition of Alice Munro and Andre Dubus — how restraint becomes a story’s central formal argument.

“Peppermint Candy” and “Drenched to the Bone” read as a diptych about pedagogical burnout, moral compromise, and a biography spent in the classroom.

First-person justification in “Peppermint Candy” and “Mia Bambina” — the plain, procedural diction of the reasonable criminal narrator, after Nabokov and Highsmith.

How cookies, candy, sugar, and whiskey carry love, obligation, and at last poison through the same trusted hands.

Aiden Glencar’s second sight read against W. B. Yeats — what Mulhern keeps from Irish folk tradition, what he discards, and what he invents.

How missing tags, action beats, and the em dash render interruption and withheld speech without a word of narratorial comment.

Molly Bonamici, Myra Bocca, and Peggy Fleming as deliberate citations — each name a promise the narrative keeps.

How “you” addressed to the dying and the dead, in the poems of Crossings, turns the reader into an accidental listener.

A textual history of “Assumptions” across its 2015 web publication, 2016 collection, 2020 Galway Review printing, and 2026 return to book form.

A structural reading of the collection’s twenty-poem sequence, from emigration to unresolved grief.

Objective correlative and the grief-work of Crossings — how a folded robe, a photograph on a table, and a shattered print of The Last Supper carry grief the poems never once name outright.

A full-length study of the Kirkus-starred novel — its structure, its dual geography of Boston and Achill Island, its psychiatric plot, and its place in Mulhern's body of work.

A synthesis of Mulhern's craft signature, recurring tropes, thematic architecture, and allusive practice across the fiction, poetry, and teaching.

The Angel of Death premise, the Defoe inheritance, and the deadpan comedy that grew out of a single year of overwhelming loss.

The storefront psychic who first calls Molly an Angel of Death, and the widow whose real trip home turns out to be a grave.

Tracing the Nonna/Nana figure across the fiction — a single recurring matriarchal archetype who is simultaneously moral authority and moral hazard.

Gabe, Wilton Manors, and the households James Mulhern builds outside the Irish-Catholic and Italian-American bloodline.

How vulgarity marks trust rather than breach in the fiction — and what it costs when the same words are aimed by a stranger instead of a grandmother.

Mr. Scarfone and the benign mafioso — how organized crime becomes a source of domestic comfort rather than menace.