Nearly a century after “Dubliners,” with which James Joyce meant “to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,” Roddy Doyle, who was born in Dublin in 1958, aims to evince, not just a paralyzed capital, but a paralyzed island, populated by 4 million and seemingly adrift in the tempestuous North Atlantic. The current immobilization results from strikingly different circumstances: Ireland’s precipitous and unprecedented economic growth, which has given it the second highest rate of per capita GDP in the European Union, and an immigration rate higher than the United States. “I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one,” Mr. Doyle writes in a foreword to his new collection, “The Deportees and Other Stories” (Viking, 242 pages, $24.95).

Mr. Doyle has included eight stories here, and each depicts, often with a fierce emotional weight and an exhilarating comic zing, the tenuous mixture of agitation, unease, and suspicion that pervades contemporary Ireland. All of his characters, including a Filipino midwife, a Polish nanny, a Lithuanian biochemist, a Sudanese former child soldier, and lots and lots of Nigerian émigrés, struggle against the pernicious forces that resist change and difference. Taken as a whole, the book amounts to a revision of a prominent section in Mr. Doyle’s first novel, “The Commitments” (1987), in which band manager Jimmy Rabbitte famously labels the Irish “the niggers of Europe.” In fact, Mr. Doyle admits in his foreword, “Twenty years on, there are thousands of Africans living in Ireland.” Today, he adds, “I wouldn’t use that line. [It] would make no sense.”

Mr. Doyle’s new stories are the product of a relationship he formed with Metro Eireann, an immigrant and ethnic newspaper founded in 2000 by two Nigerians. It’s heartening that a Booker Prize winner (in 1993, for “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha”) would offer to contribute to an upstart publication — presumably for love of country and art (and maybe sanity: “I need to write,” he said last year. “I go a bit bonkers if I don’t”). The resulting collection begins with a story whose inauspicious title, “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner,” threatens intellectual shenanigans — Mr. Doyle is, after all, a regular contributor to McSweeney’s — and the suspicion appears validated when the unwelcoming father likens his dinner guest, a refugee from Nigeria, to Sidney Poitier. But, despite a slight didacticism, the story portrays a genuinely conflicted father, one who talks to his daughters about their sex lives “confidently, frankly, and, yeah, filthily,” but condemns an African man because his continent is stricken by AIDS, civil wars, and people with “flies on their faces.” And that appears Mr. Doyle’s point: Racism is something more than an outmoded notion.

Hopefulness, too, may be generally out of fashion, but in the title story, which Mr. Doyle calls a “sort of” sequel to “The Commitments,” he spins a tale of such sanguinary velocity and heedless merrymaking that we readily accept the overly simplistic theme. Jimmy Rabbitte, his Irish soul band long dispersed, posts another ad: “Brothers and Sisters, Welcome to Ireland. Do you want the Celtic Tiger to dance to your music?” He concludes, “White Irish need not apply.” The ad echoes the notorious window signs that once dotted Manhattan, and the result is an African-Spanish-Romanian-you-name-it group that sings Aimee Mann and Eminem. The pop culture guideposts are a Doyle trademark, but the author braces his story with something more solid: a scintillating study of late-thirties married life. Jimmy must tuck in the kids before playing his favorite Parental Advisory album. When snuggling with his wife, he wonders “which she’d noticed first, the gut or the erection.”

Some stories are too schematic to succeed. “57% Irish,” though a classic example of Mr. Doyle’s humor, relies on a blunt conceit: The minister for the arts and ethnicity aims to “measure Irishness,” the main criterion being one’s excitement level when viewing a Roy Keane World Cup goal. “Black Hoodie” misses the nuances of human nature. Immigrants are nothing but über-moral, and the best cops “eat their jumbo rolls without getting butter all over their shirts.”

Interestingly, the collection’s most powerful story is set outside of Ireland. “Home to Harlem” tells of Declan, a graduate student from University College Dublin who arrives in New York in a misguided attempt to discern the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on Irish literature. Declan mocks traditional Irish culture, particularly its literary heritage — “the smugness,” he calls it — and we soon realize that this young, half-Irish black man actually seeks his place in a haphazard world. When his ancestors were young, he thinks, “you were Irish or you weren’t, one thing or the other.” Now, he says, being Irish is “passing for something else — the Paddy, the European, the peasant, the rocker, the leprechaun.” Mr. Doyle has met them all.

Mr. Peed is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker. He last wrote for these pages on the novelist Michael Chabon.