Dubliners

Fifteen stories set in Dublin follow life from childhood through youth and adulthood to death: a boy's first crush and a disappointing bazaar in 'Araby', a young woman unable to leave on a boat to a new life in 'Eveline', clerks, singers and politicians, and finally 'The Dead', in which a man discovers at the end of a winter dance party that he never really knew his wife.

Joyce struggled for nearly ten years to find a publisher, who feared the stories' frankness, and the book finally appeared in 1914. 'The Dead' is often called one of the finest short stories in English. Read it before A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

James Joyce (1882–1941) was born in Dublin, educated by the Jesuits, and left Ireland in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, never to live there again. They lived in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, where he taught English and struggled with poverty and failing eyesight, while writing almost entirely about the city he had left.

Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were followed by Ulysses, published in Paris in 1922 and banned for years in Britain and America, and by the even more experimental Finnegans Wake. He changed what a novel could be.