Penguin Books Australia

'Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis . It had always sounded strangely in my ears . . . But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work'

The dream-like, comic tale of a family in Ireland, Finnegans Wake is written in Joyce's unique personal language that echoes and plays with many tongues other than English, and uses parables, phrases, wordplay, puns, ballads, philosophy and religious texts to capture an extraordinary invented world.

'Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.'

From a child grappling with the death of a fallen priest, to a young woman's dilemma over whether to elope to Argentina with her lover, to the dance party at which a man discovers...

James Joyce's naturalistic, unflinching portrayal of ordinary working people in his Dubliners stories was a literary landmark. These four stories from that collection offer glimpses of defeated lives – an unremarkable death, a theft, a desperate plan, a failed writer's dream – yet each creates a compelling and ultimately redemptive vision of a city and of human experience.