To catch these cons, Longarm will have to play by their rules. Rumor has it that Deputy Marshal Custis Long is now riding on the other side of the law—swindling ranchers and taking bribes, just as cool as you please. But if folks’d only look closer, they’d notice the fake moustache and counterfeit badge—and recognize the conman behind them… A motley crew of thieves, gamblers, and ladies of the night has just arrived in Ogallala, looking to relieve the local bank of its contents. But their plan—to have one of their men impersonate the lawman known as Longarm—has a fatal flaw. The owlhoots never counted on running smack into Longarm himself…

In this study, Charles Fanning has written the first general account of the origins and development of a literary tradition among American writers of Irish birth or background who have explored the Irish immigrant or ethnic experience in works of fiction. The result is a portrait of the evolving fictional self-consciousness of an immigrant group over a span of 250 years. Fanning traces the roots of Irish-American writing back to the eighteenth century and carries it forward through the traumatic years of the Famine to the present time with an intensely productive period in the twentieth century beginning with James T. Farrell. Later writers treated in depth include Edwin O'Connor, Elizabeth Cullinan, Maureen Howard, and William Kennedy. Along the way he places in the historical record many all but forgotten writers, including the prolific Mary Ann Sadlier. The Irish Voice in America is not only a highly readable contribution to American literary history but also a valuable reference to many writers and their works. For this second edition, Fanning has added a chapter that covers the fiction of the past decade. He argues that contemporary writers continue to draw on Ireland as a source and are important chroniclers of the modern American experience.

This book examines ideas of Irishness in the writing of Mary McCarthy, Maeve Brennan, Alice McDermott, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue. Individual chapters engage in detail with questions central to the social or literary history of Irish women in North America and pay special attention to the following: discourses of Irish femininity in twentieth-century American and Canadian literature; mythologies of Irishness in an American and Canadian context; transatlantic literary exchanges and the influence of canonical Irish writers; and ideas of exile in the work of diasporic women writers.

Shows what life was like in the late nineteenth century for a poor Irish-American family.