Dubliners

James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. He was nonetheless educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at University College, Dublin, and displayed considerable academic and literary ability. Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional universe is firmly rooted in his native Dublin, the city which provides the settings and much of the subject matter for all of his fiction. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). James Joyce died in Zürich, on 13 January 1941.

“A hundred years on . . . Dubliners has been absorbed into our literary landscape, but in the early part of the twentieth century it was the sort of book that hadn’t been seen much before, certainly from an Irish writer, and much of it shocked the conventional literary world. . . . [Joyce] was taking the lived landscape of his childhood and transforming it into something universal. . . . The stories contain some of the most beautiful sentences ever written in English.” —Colum McCann, from the Foreword“A handsome deluxe edition.” —The New York Times“A gorgeous new trade paperback edition [of] arguably the most important single-author short story collection in the English language.” —KQED, “Great Lit Perfect for Summer Reading”