— Offer no longer available —

St. Patrick’s Day is Saturday. Apparently people like to drink on that day? While we’d never deny you the opportunity to enjoy a couple adult beverages, it’s also true that celebrating the Emerald Isle means indulging in some heady draughts of classic literature.

Now through the 17th, Melville House is offering three books of high Irish standing for one low price. Here’s a chance to honor the literary side of your Irish heritage. At least until Saturday rolls around …

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* The Irish Journal, by Heinrich Böll

In this unique entry in his oeuvre, Böll documents his eccentric travels around the Emerald Isle, detailing its charm in a way that gives his own habit of studying character and paradox, not mention national identity, a beguiling twist. The result, here presented with an epilogue written years later with Böll’s observation of changes since his first visit, is a reflection on the essence of a place and its people that is, indeed, evergreen.

* The Dead, by James Joyce

Often cited as the best work of short fiction ever written, Joyce’s elegant story details a New Year’s Eve gathering in Dublin that is so evocative and beautiful that it prompts the protagonist’s wife to make a shocking revelation to her husband — closing the story with an emotionally powerful epiphany that is unsurpassed in modern literature.

* The Lonely Voice, by Frank O’Connor

The Lonely Voice offers a master class on short story writing with a true master of the form. It is, in fact, based on the lectures that legendary Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor gave while teaching a master class in fiction writing at Stanford University in 1961. Among the students in that class: Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Russel Banks and Susan Howe.

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Make sure to act fast. Soon this offer, like so many pints of Guinness, will be nothing more than a memory.