The greatest short story collection in the English language, now in special centennial edition.
James Joyce's groundbreaking collection of short stories about the beloved city of his birth.
Perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language, James Joyce’s Dubliners is both a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century and a moral history of a nation and a people whose “golden age” has passed. His richly drawn characters—at once intensely Irish and utterly universal—may forever haunt the reader. In mesmerizing writing that evokes rich imagery, Joyce delves into the heart of the city of his birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners’ speech in remarkably realistic portrayals of their inner lives. This magnificent collection of fifteen stories reveals Joyce at his most accessible and perhaps most profound.
With an Introduction by Edna O’Brien and an Afterword by Malachy McCourt
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.