A seven year old boy, named Carson flies to England with his sick and dying father on a holiday to stay with his grandmother in �Carson�s Trail�, by Jim O�Donoghue. Carson quickly realizes that he�s pretty much on his own in a young coming of age piece and explores the wilds past the house where he stays, going beyond his familiar terrain. He goes exploring out past his back yard into woods and fields further away from his house and security than he�d ever been.

Now he was in wild territory. Although he hadn�t meant to come so far, he was glad. He would have something new to tell them when he got back home � something they might not have seen themselves, or not for a long time.

A brave young boy, soon to be really left on his own, he shows a spirit to survive and to venture out past his own personal confines.

Emer Martin�s story is a tale of immigrants in the U.S. � an Irish mother, a Persian father and the kids born to them. �Thieves of the Dream� is not your usual feel-good �immigrants pursuing the American dream� story but rather how one�s past is never too far away no matter what distance one travels and the failure of that dream, or at the least, a loss of innocence when that past does turn up on your doorstep.

Staying with the �Irish in the U.S.� theme, Tom Tierney offers a small but poignant snapshot of an itinerant man who has stopped in a small unnamed town and taken a temporary painting job at the motel where he stays. In �Looking for America�, Tierney examines the story behind the story and wonders if continuing to do the job one is hired to do is futile in light of what�s ahead, or does one continue for the sake of one�s own ethic, even if the reasons have changed.

On my last day, I looked through the rooms we had failed to clean up. I had slept in worse, I thought, but I was saddened still by their tawdriness, by the dusty carpet and the scratches and marks on the paintwork

Colm Liddy�s short piece takes place within the space of a few minutes in a hotel toilet during a wedding party. �The Bride is Crying in a Toilet Cubicle�, is a hysterically funny vignette or one-act that zeroes in on five wedding participants who are each connected to the other, at least for those few minutes while each is in their own cubicle. Neil Simon on ecstasy?

There are a few memorable mad characters in the collection. Viv McDade, in �Soul Mate� gives new meaning to stalking while Mia Gallagher has an obnoxious male receive retribution (and perhaps a sort of redemption) from an enraged woman for all the wrongs done to women through the ages in �Polyfilla�. The most chilling of these characters appears in Breda Wall Ryan�s, �The Egg Collector�, about a woman whose imaginary world has entirely supplanted reality, or at least reality as some see it.

Lucy is an overweight underemployed actress in �Cuts�, by Gina Moxley, but keeps a brave face to the slings and arrows from her somewhat insensitive colleagues. The reader has an impulse to feel sorry for her but she doesn�t wallow in self-pity as she deals with the hurt through humour and sex.

I�ve always wondered exactly what it is that a writer-in-residence actually does. Thanks to Michael J Farrell�s droll take on this in �Writer-in-Residence�, I now know - very enlightening.

James Lawless� tragic piece, �Brown Brick�, explores a sort of psychotic form of revenge in the deconstruction of a house, brick by brick. Beside the beautiful writing in this story, Lawless conveys the ephemeral nature of something normally thought of as solid and permanent. The discrepancy between the two ideas reaches deep and evokes a well of sadness.

Finally, D. Gleeson ends with a kind of Irish folk tale called, �Daragh Maguire and the Black Blood�, a cautionary lesson in what should be obvious, but rendered with otherworld imagery. Daragh is alone as is young Carson in the beginning story. Alone together.

This excellent collection is filled with other great writing from some known writers, William Wall, Ingo Schulze, Evelyn Conlon and Rosemary Jenkinson, as well as newer writers such as Danny Denton, Damien Doorley, Helena Nolan, Donal O�Sullivan and Ragnar Almqvist.

It seems like yesterday that I reviewed the previous short story collection from Stinging Fly, �These are our Lives�, which boasted some of the best short story writing I�d seen in a long time so it seems an embarrassment of literary riches to have this new anthology in front of me. Declan Meade has assembled another wonderful group of pieces and has ensured that the place of the short story in the literary landscape remains unassailable.