Subjects and style in Mary Morrissy's short stories and novels leave reviewers struggling for words to explain the appeal of her always compelling, yet bittersweet, stories; meticulous, exact, sensuous, exotic, they note, many remarking on her black humor and the almost too intelligent nature of plot and prose. Since her first story appeared on David Marcus's Young Writers Page in The Irish Press in 1976, Morrissy has had an eager, if small, Irish and British following, a following that swelled considerably with the publication of her first volume of short stories in 1993 and her first novel in 1995. Morrissy resists traditional identifications of Irish writers with place and time, setting much of her work in unnamed, unidentifiable places, creating characters arguably affected by an Irish Catholic upbringing but driven by strange, often disturbing, perspectives, as universal as they are Irish. Morrissy's voice is a significant one in Irish writing, one...