Kirkus Reviews · Starred · Best Book of 2019
kirkusreviews.com
“A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.”
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/james-mulhern/give-them-unquiet-dreams/Press Kit · 2026
Novelist, poet, and short story writer
Awarded · Starred Review
Kirkus Reviews
Best Book of 2019
for Give Them Unquiet Dreams
Read the author's brief statement — A Note on My Philosophy of Writing.
Author Biography
Novelist, poet, and short story writer
Top Honor
Kirkus Best Book of 2019
Give Them Unquiet Dreams
Credential
Aesthetica Creative Writing Award
Shortlisted 2021 · poetry
Credential
Oxford University Writing Fellowship
Fully funded
Credential
Fish Short Story Prize
Longlisted
Credential
Pushcart Prize Nominee, 2017
Short fiction
Credential
200+ literary journal appearances
Fiction and poetry
James Mulhern is the author of two literary novels — Give Them Unquiet Dreams (2019), a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019 and starred-review title, and Molly Bonamici (2016), which Kirkus Reviews praised for its “gleefully and wonderfully odd protagonist.” His work moves between Irish-Catholic Boston and Italian-American Revere, between the comic and the gothic, and between this world and what his narrators call “the second sight.”
His writing has appeared in literary journals more than two hundred times. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017, longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in 2021 for his poetry. He was awarded a fully funded writing fellowship to the University of Oxford. His novella A Prayer for Home (2016) was praised by The Missouri Review; his story collection Assumptions and Other Stories followed.
Mulhern brings to his fiction more than thirty-five years in publishing and education. He has served as a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston and at Clark Boardman Callaghan in New York, as Department Chair of English, as a College Board AP English consultant, and as an AP consultant for the National Math and Science Initiative. He is the founder of Silver Current Press and the 2601 Literary Salon.
He lives in Philadelphia, where he writes, teaches, and edits manuscripts.
Featured Title · Novel · 2019
Synopsis
Set in 1970s Irish-Catholic Boston, Give Them Unquiet Dreams follows fourteen-year-old Aiden Glencar, a gay boy with the “second sight,” as he tries to free his mother from a psychiatric institute, navigates his domineering and occasionally kleptomaniacal grandmother, and confers nightly with the spirit of his dead grandfather. A lyric, comic, and gothic family novel in the lineage of James Joyce’s The Dead and Yeats’s The Stolen Child — about grief, faith, queerness, and the porousness of past, present, and future.
Critical Praise
A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.
Kirkus Reviews · Starred Review
The quieter scenes show the mind of a talented writer at work… Mulhern demonstrates considerable powers of description, particularly when portraying his saddest characters.
Kirkus Reviews
Give Them Unquiet Dreams is brilliant; it’s most highly recommended.
Jack Magnus · Readers’ Favorite
Mulhern’s writing displays all of the storytelling prowess of the contemporary Irish masters, yet manages to blend it in exquisitely with the use of modern day American settings.
The Galway Review
Featured Title · Novel · 2016
Synopsis
Set in 1980 Revere, Massachusetts, Molly Bonamici follows a precocious, deadpan, atheist teenage girl through an Italian-American working-class family in which her beloved grandmother Nonna is gradually revealed to be a quiet serial murderer. A literary novel in the lineage of Flannery O’Connor’s grandmothers, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan family novels — structured around Dante’s Inferno, an Emily Dickinson frame, and an inversion of Chopin’s The Awakening.
Critical Praise
The writing is elevated by a liberal use of quotes and sayings ranging from Bible verses to Thoreau and Yeats, grounding the various players’ cultural context.
Kirkus Reviews
Molly’s distinctiveness is an appealing quality and often amusing.
Kirkus Reviews
Reviews & Press · Direct Links
Every link below leads to a verified, currently live review or editorial mention.
Kirkus Reviews · Starred · Best Book of 2019
“A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.”
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/james-mulhern/give-them-unquiet-dreams/Readers’ Favorite · Jack Magnus
“Give Them Unquiet Dreams is brilliant; it’s most highly recommended.”
https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/give-them-unquiet-dreamsThe Galway Review · Editorial Note
Author feature noting Give Them Unquiet Dreams as a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year.
https://thegalwayreview.com/2022/10/15/james-mulhern-a-perfect-hit/Kirkus Reviews
“A gleefully and wonderfully odd protagonist eases readers into a bare-bones plot.”
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/james-mulhern/molly-bonamici/Contact · Rights · Inquiries