Böcker av Thomas McGonigle

"PARTY OF PICTURES is a reel, both the dance and the loop, and I suppose the stagger, highly diverting."GEORGE O'BRIEN - The Village of Longing, Dancehall Days"Party of Pictures is a splendid invitation to an annual fete, one honoring a madcap saint, a party both ordained and yet unexpected. McGonigle excels at capturing memorable dates and places - and who can resist a St. Patrick's Day bacchanal, especially one hilarious and reflective, that repeats year after year at the same Greenwich Village apartment, an event engendering spiritual and spirited commentary? McGonigle excels as the perfect host: attentive, gregarious and generous. Enjoy!"WILLIAM O'ROURKE - Idle Hands, The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, The Meekness of Isaac"Narrated by a sort of track-skipping DJ, Party of Pictures is a high-wire-enacted party-of-fools satire that glides us through a Greenwich Village apartment mined with literary trapdoors. Tours de force are what I praise highest and that's what Party of Pictures is."TOM WHALEN - The President in Her Tower, The Straw that BrokeDoes Party of Pictures capture a modern pilgrimage to the ancient bacchanalia? Or a final trip to a Greenwich Village crash pad? No matter: the novel is one great party. Thomas McGonigle, gatekeeper and guide, navigates the ephemeral world of downtown Manhattan as it reveals itself in a West Village apartment for St. Patrick's Day. Snapshots of the living and the dead cover the walls. Not everyone has been invited to the Party of Pictures, but all are caught in the photos.

Like Samuel Beckett, McGonigle observes what might be full is empty and what appears to be empty may, in fact, be full. In this collage of verbal snapshots (where remembering becomes forgetting and the attempt to forget becomes obsessive frustration), we wander through the byways of Bulgaria and America during the forty days via the Orthodox aerial toll booths until the soul is judged. Absurdity becomes sanity and vice versa.

THE BULGARIAN PSYCHIATRIST arrived with a suitcase filled with ties, and knowing how to wear a dead man''s clothes, and how to initiate a son into the art of beating a prisoner to death and ... all of which did not prepare him for a life of listening in the USA.

Dominican Tradition

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.