Ulysses
James Joyce, 1922
One Dublin day in 1904, followed through two men's minds — an ad-canvasser and a young writer — with every joke, smell and stray thought left in.
James Joyce
1882–1941
Dublin, in Joyce's hands, is a place where a street, a song or a half-finished sentence can carry the weight of a whole life. Start with Dubliners: fifteen short stories, plain and exact, that let you feel the city from a boy's first crush to a party that ends in a quiet shock. If you want the full stretch of his mind, Ulysses takes one ordinary day and leaves in every joke, smell and stray thought.
Feels like longing, melancholy and art.
Start with Ulysses.
The first edition was published in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, after printers in Britain and America refused to set it.
A dog on a beach is not looking for anything it can name.
Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves. Books by James Joyce
Poetry
James Joyce, 1907
The poems Joyce wrote before Ulysses: love lyrics built like songs, and later, darker pieces from Trieste and Paris, short enough to read standing up.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce, 1916
A boy in Dublin grows up inside a family, a religion and a language, and tries to invent a self that none of them wrote for him.
Dubliners
James Joyce, 1914
Fifteen short stories of ordinary Dubliners, from a boy's first crush to a party that ends in a quiet shock, written with a precision that makes small lives feel enormous.
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