Elizabeth Cullinan's two short-story collections and two novels examine in detail the lives of Irish American Catholics in or from the New York City area, the nuances of their family and romantic relationships, and the place and meaning of the Church in their lives. Identifying herself primarily as Irish American, Cullinan has been grouped with Tom McHale, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill, but, as Eileen Kennedy points out in the Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Catholic American Writing (1989), "no other writer of the Irish-American experience has probed it so closely, so aware of the tenacious network that binds together family and Church." Cullinan's first novel, House of Gold (1969), won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, placing her in company with Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Roth. A second novel, A Change of Scene (1982), was funded by grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Carnegie Fund. Through her...