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-fashioned 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.

Thomas McGonigle, born at 112 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, a patriot of Patchogue, Dublin and Sofia, has two books THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV (Dalkey Archive/Northwestern University Press), the last minutes of the life of Nikola Petkov as he was being hanged in Bulgaria in 1947— and GOING TO PATCHOGUE (Dalkey Archive) the going to, the being in and the coming back from that village on Long Island by way of Bulgaria and presided over by Lord Patchogue who also visited in the mind of Jacques Rigaut. McGonigle’s work has also appeared in BOMB, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post,Public Illuminations Magazine… he lives on East First Street in Manhattan…for 25 years he was a foot messenger for Maple Vail Book Manufacturing and continues to teach at BMCC.

Jeremy M. Davies is the author of The Knack of Doing(David R. Godine, 2016), a collection of short fiction, as well as the novels Rose Alley (2009) and Fancy (2015). He is an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and sits on the advisory board of Dorothy, a Publishing Project. His fiction has appeared in such publications as Harper’s, The White Review, and The Brooklyn Rail.

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