The Brandon Book of Irish Short Stories, edited by Steve McDonogh (Brandon, £6.99)

The variousness of this exciting collection of short fiction by twenty-three new and newish Irish writers transcends geographic and psychological boundaries. As Steve Mc Donogh points out, the contributors "write out of themselves rather than out of any particular sense of Irishness". The locales range from Ireland to Australia and the US, and some of the language itself has been internationalised and streamlined, as if by the vernacular of movies and television. A sentence of Mary O'Donnell's represents one extreme of what she calls "the exoticism of exile": "The God-groupies didn't freak Connie." But Marina Carr proves that the Celtic imagination endures. She writes of mermaid and sea-horse seeds: "You put them into water and they grow and can even talk to you." Reassuring.