Those familiar with short fiction often recognise the distinctive excellence of Irish writers among their international peers. Studying the Irish short story entails engaging with a genre “often hailed as the national prose form in Ireland” (D’hoker 2021) and confronting a pervasive mythology: the idea that the short form is somehow inscribed in the national DNA. Paul Delaney’s Anthologisation and Irish Short Fiction: Magnitudes of Telling (2025) arrives as a timely and lucid intervention to interrogate this mythology.

Responding to Elke D’hoker’s call for scholarships that explore the “complex mixture of influences which have shaped and continue to shape the Irish short story” (D’hoker 2015), Delaney turns his attention to the process of anthologisation as a structuring force within modern literary culture. The phrase “magnitudes of telling”, which titles the book, encapsulates his central argument: that short stories not only tell in multiple ways, but are also continually retold through acts of curation, republication, and recontextualisation (1). As the first monograph to treat the anthology as a critical lens for Irish short fiction, Delaney’s study reveals how editorial practice, publishing economics, ideological framing, and gatekeeping shape the canon and influence how readers and critics understand the genre. This interest in editorial mediation and publishing structures can be situated alongside recent work on Irish short fiction in periodical contexts, including Yen-Chi Wu’s Irish Writers and The New Yorker in the Mid-Twentieth Century (2026).

The book opens with a striking remark from The Irish Times in 2010: “We may not be very good at economics or honest politics, but we certainly know how to write a short story” (2). This paradox of national self-definition in the post-Celtic Tiger years is emblematic of a broader cultural narrative. As Delaney argues, the ever-present influence of authors like Frank O’Connor, particularly his notion of submerged population groups, and the legacy of Seán Ó Faoláin and David Marcus’s anthologies have helped construct, repeat, and institutionalise the trope of the Irish genius for the short story.

To grasp the “full complexity” of Irish short fiction (Estévez-Saá 2015), one must look beyond the texts themselves to the transnational nature of the genre and the infrastructures that shape its circulation: publishing houses, literary prizes, funding bodies, and the networks of editors and agents who determine what gets read and remembered. Drawing on scholars such as Elke D’hoker and Chris Mourant, Delaney foregrounds the “polytextual” environment of short fiction, where each story exists in multiple iterations and within shifting frames of reference (D’hoker and Mourant 2021: 2). In this context, the anthologies’ role is that of an archivist and at the same time a trendsetter: an aesthetic and ideological arrangement that produces meaning through inclusion, exclusion, and juxtaposition, becoming an active agent in cultural memory-making.

Delaney’s first chapter, “Defining and rethinking ‘the Irish short story’”, starts to challenge the homogenising assumptions carried by this phrasing and discusses the way in which “the form – or rather, the forms – of short fiction have been discussed in Irish writing” (19). This chapter raises a fundamental question: which came first, the tradition of Irish short fiction or the anthology? Beginning with Ní Dhuibhne’s paired short satires, “A Literary Lunch” (2007) and “City of Literature” (2017), to expose how gatekeeping operates within Ireland’s literary institutions, he then expands outward to critique the mythology of Irish storytelling. While acknowledging the enduring influence of O’Connor, Ó Faoláin, and Lavin, he resists essentialist readings that link form to ethnicity or temperament. Starting by questioning the “gender blindness” (23) so pervasive in the first male-dominated anthologies from the 1960s and 1970s, where claims of neutrality often masked the systematic marginalisation of women writers, he also considers the seminal role of the Exploring English 1 (1967) anthology, after being introduced into English syllabi, in shaping certain tropes surrounding the Irish short story which have been later canonised, one of the most entrenched being “the impression that writing by women is a subsidiary concern for many readers of Irish literature” (54). He locates the Irish short story within transnational exchanges of form, genre, and publication, considering acts of translation, the “labyrinthine complexities of Anglo-Irish relations” (48) and their impact on Irish artistic endeavours.

In the second and third chapters, Delaney’s strong theoretical knowledge works alongside an in-depth analysis of selected short stories, making these two chapters particularly useful for students of the form(s). The second chapter, “A Gathering of Possibilities: Acts of Anthologisation”, forms the book’s intellectual heart. Here, Delaney moves from theory to case studies, analysing how anthologies have shaped public taste and academic discourse. He reads landmark collections starting from Marcus’s essential Phoenix Irish Short Stories collections and their role in shaping writers’ and readers’ aesthetics and expectations. He then considers four posthumous anthologies in Marcus’s series, and the editorial choices made for each collection, alongside Sinead Gleeson’s The Long Gaze Back (2015) and The Art of the Glimpse (2020), and Ken Bruen’s Dublin Noir (2008). What emerges is a portrait of anthologisation as a cultural negotiation: each collection constructs its own imagined community through acts of inclusion and omission (10). Drawing on Gleeson’s introduction to The Art of the Glimpse, Delaney shows how these curated volumes both democratise and delimit the literary field. The “gathering of possibilities” represents how an anthology is a stage where writers come together and tradition(s) are reinforced or challenged, a space where differences are articulated and networks created or contested between “authors, forms, styles, generations, and texts” (120).

“‘Magnitudes of Telling’: Portability and Revision” expands the book’s argument into questions of textual fluidity and media circulation. The short story, he reminds us, has always been a movable form, migrating from magazines to collections to radio broadcasts and digital platforms (8). What distinguishes the contemporary moment is the acceleration and visibility of this movement. A single story might appear in a magazine, be republished in an author’s collection, excerpted in a school anthology, and later adapted for a podcast: all these versions shape readerly expectations differently. Delaney reads this portability as a metaphor for the short story’s openness: its resistance to closure and its capacity for renewal through retelling (193). Moreover, stories may be revised by authors after initial publication, and the surrounding paratexts may shift, influencing interpretation. Rather than resolving this by privileging a single authoritative version, Delaney argues that critics must engage with the multiplicity of a story’s forms. While anthologies exercise considerable power in determining which version “should be made available to readers” (129), he insists that criticism should engage with the “variety and the plasticity of its practice” (198), treating revision and circulation as constitutive features of the genre.

At the heart of Anthologisation and Irish Short Fiction lies an argument about relationality: between stories and their publication contexts, between national literatures and transnational networks, between the text and its paratexts. The notion of “magnitudes of telling” wraps the multiplicity of narrative forms and the social processes that sustain them. This approach flows into the growing stream of transnational approaches in Irish Studies. While earlier criticism often sought to define “the Irish short story” as a self-contained tradition, Delaney positions it within a global ecology of forms and media. The result is a model of Irish literary culture that is fluid, dynamic, and adjusted to the material conditions of production.

The book’s contribution is dual. First, it reorients the field from author-centric or thematic readings toward a systemic understanding of how literature circulates. Second, it invites scholars to think transnationally and transmedially. This perspective has implications far beyond Ireland: it offers a methodology for reading contemporary literature as a set of processes rather than products. Delaney writes with the clarity of a teacher and the gaze of a veteran of short fiction. At times, the range of references, spanning decades, genres, and media, can feel dizzying, but he traces the paths of his arguments with agility. Thanks to this monograph, we are invited to observe how stories live, move, and multiply as if under a microscope. By focusing on anthologies, Delaney transforms what might seem a peripheral topic into a prism through which to scrutinise the evolving ecology of Irish literature. This book will undoubtedly prove useful for scholars of the short story form, both within Irish Studies and beyond, and for those interested in the intersections of literature, media, and material culture.