"On Saint Patrick's Day, an Irish American writer visiting Dublin takes a day trip around the city and muses on death, sex, lost love, Irish immigrant history, and his younger days as a student in Europe. Like James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas McGonigle's award-winning novel St. Patrick's Day takes place on a single day, combining a stream-of-consciousness narrative with masterful old-fashion storytelling, which samples the literary histories of both Ireland and America and the worlds they influence. St. Patrick's Day relies on an interior monologue to portray the narrator's often dark perceptions and fantasies; his memories of his family in Patchogue, New York, and of the women in his life; and his encounters throughout the day, as well as many years ago, with revelers, poets, African students, and working-class Dubliners. Thomas McGonigle's novel is a brilliant portrait of the uneasy alliance between the Irish and Irish Americans, the result of the centuries-old diaspora and immigration, which left unsettled the mysteries of origins and legacy. St. Patrick's Day is a rollicking pub-crawl through multi-sexual contemporary Dublin, a novel full of passion, humor, and insight, which makes the reader the author's accomplice, a witness to his heartfelt memorial to the fraught love affair between ancestors and generations. McGonigle tells the stories both countries need to hear. This particular St. Patrick's Day is an unforgettable one. "This is first rate prose. From the evidence of both this book and his previously published novel, The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov, we realize we are in the presence of a great novelist in Thomas McGonigle. He puts a certain period of Dublin literary history before our eyes with freshness and honesty. Not only that but by his skillful use of modernist techniques he gives the 'Irish Novel' a long outstanding and much deserved kick up the arse into the twenty-first century.I praise the work mightily." --Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Ireland Chair of Poetry and former Ireland Professor of Poetry"-- Provided by publisher.
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