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Mr. DynamiteAuthor: Meredith Brosnan American Literature Series August 2004 187 pages, 5.5 x 8 paperback, 1-56478-353-7 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.80—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
Jarleth Prendergast is an ex-pat Irishman, an aging punk rocker, a film snob, a copy-shop employee, a dime-store intellectual, and a truly desperate man. His marriage is in tatters and his career as an avantgarde claymation artist is heading nowhere. As the book opens, Jarleth receives a letter from Irish lawyer Sean Reynolds about a possible inheritance from his Aunt Lucy, and promptly falls into fits of delusion as hilarious as they are utterly pathetic. Certain beyond reason that this "cash fuel injection" will turn his life around and casting himself in heroic and sentimental cliché of the cinema, Jarleth enters on a course of rampant self-destruction, narrating it all in his head to his new best friend: Sean, the Irish lawyer.
Mr. Dynamite is an extraordinary first novel that melds an Irish writer's high style and penchant for belly laughs with the grotesque smash-and-grab energy of pre-9/11 New York, making for a mad, sad, and profoundly funny book.
About the Author
| Meredith Brosnan was born in Ireland, where he studied English and Philosophy at University College, Dublin. He moved to New York in 1984. In addition to his various short stories, reviews, and essays, Brosnan is involved with the New York theater scene and has had plays produced at both ABC No Rio and the Tribeca Lab. |
Praise
"Mr. Dynamite is one of the funniest books I've read in the past several years."—Harvey Pekar"If I had a nickel for every stewed Irish saint I've sat drinking with in a New York City bar . . . I'd give them all to Meredith Brosnan for writing Mr. Dynamite. Roaringly funny and howlingly sad, it reminds me of A Fairytale of New York—both the J.P. Donleavy novel and Shane MaGowan's boozy Christmas carol."—John Strausbaugh, author of Rock Til You Drop
"If J.P. Donleavy, Flann O'Brien, and Frank McCourt combined to write a novel, they would be fortunate is they could invent one as funny and Irish as Meredith Brosnan's. A hilarious story that deserves a large audience."—Finbarr McCabe, author of The Great Famine