Thomas McGonigle’s new novel ST. PATRICK’S DAY: another day in Dublin is the 2016 Notre Dame Review Book Prize series winner. The NDRBP started as a first volume prize, awarded to an author who has published short fiction or poetry in the Notre Dame Review. Established in 2013 by the NDR, in conjunction with the University of Notre Dame Press, the prize honors the work of both accomplished and emerging authors, who have yet to publish a volume of stories, or a collection of poetry. Consideration is now given to novels, not necessarily, in their case, first novels. Besides publication, the author is awarded a $1000 prize.
Thomas McGonigle will read at the University of Notre Dame on November 9, 2016, 7:30PM – 9:00PM, at the Hammes Campus Bookstore.
ST. PATRICK’S DAY, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, 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. 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. 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.
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.
Thomas McGonigle was born in 1944 in Brooklyn. His previous novels, reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Voice Literary Supplement, include The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov and Going to Patchogue. He lives in New York City.