I am an American writer with family roots in Ireland and the New York area. Raised in Switzerland, France, Ireland, and the UK, I attended the University of Ulster and the University of Edinburgh. I lived in New York City for many years, working as a teacher, translator, bartender, and freelance editor. My novel Killoyle, which Publishers Weekly called "a virtuoso performance," was published in 1997 by Dalkey Archive Press, and is currently in its fourth printing. In 2003, a second novel, The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad, was published by Grove Press, New York. The Village Voice said it “resembles Joyce at his comically prolix best.” German versions of both novels, translated by the award-winning German translator and author Harry Rowohlt, have been critically and commercially successful. The third volume in the Killoyle trilogy, The Maladjusted Terrorist, was published in Germany as Killoyle Wein und Käse in 2006 and is forthcoming in English. In 2007, all three novels were reissued in German by Kein & Aber, Zürich, as a boxed set. As a critic and essayist, I am a regular contributor to Boston Review, and my work has appeared in many journals and reviews, including The Economist, The New York Times Book Review, The Literary Review, The Scotsman, and The Texas Observer. I currently live near Austin, Texas, and I am finishing another silly novel, provisionally titled Ohiowa Impromptu.