The Irish Martyr (Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction)

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.