The Irish Martyr

By Russell Working and Working

Book Overview

Winner of the 2006 Sullivan Prize, The Irish Martyr is a collection of ten stories by Russell Working, an award-winning fiction writer, Chicago Tribune reporter, and former foreign correspondent. With an impressive imaginative reach, Working peoples his stories with unforgettable characters, giving flesh and bone to issues in the headlines.

Ranging widely in voice and place, these stories explore the emotional repercussions of fragile humans caught in often harsh situations beyond their control. That we respond to their pathos and humor, resignation and anger, testifies to Working's skill as a chronicler of fictive lives that all too clearly resonate with our world.

In the Pushcart Prize-winning title story, we meet an Egyptian girl obsessed with an armed Irishman who moves next door to her family's Sinai beach house. In "Help," a man reflects on his career spent receiving multimillion-dollar payments from deposed generals and presidents, while "Perjury" considers what happens when a boy in a Pacific Northwest town is summoned to testify in the trial of his alcoholic father. A North Korean woman flees her homeland, allowing herself to be sold as a wife to a Chinese farmer in "Dear Leader." "Slava" describes how the Chechen war touches the life of a Russian doctor in the Pacific seaport of Vladivostok.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0268044082
• ISBN13: 9780268044084
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Length: 174 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The best fiction I ever read!

Just could not put it down. This book, I predict will become a blockbuster of a movie.

It is unethical to buy or sell uncorrected page proofs

This is a note from the author. I am aghast that any book editor who was mailed a review copy would sell it online, in competition with the publisher. Review copies are cheap-looking and printed on low-quality paper. They contain occasional typos. More to the point, they are sent out in an attempt to generate publicity for the book. Whoever sells or buys uncorrected page proofs is stealing royalties (meager as they are) from the author and profits from a small university press that took a risk publishing this book. --Russell Working

An engaging collection of Russel Working's most intriguing short stories

The Irish Martyr is an engaging collection of Russel Working's most intriguing short stories. As a catching insight into Working and his muse's product, The Irish Martyr is collectively an almost invasively detailed and descriptive presentation of style and story unique to this author. The ten stories comprising this anthology include: Halloween, Via Dolorosa; Perjury; The Sky Ranch; The World In The First Year Of The Wire; Inmates; Help; Dear Leader; The Tin Man; Slava; and the title piece, The Irish Martyr. Working's greatest release of short stories yet, The Irish Martyr is enthusiastically recommended reading especially for those who have yet to discover the ever-engaging literary creative and storytelling style of Russel Working.