Ulysses

James Joyce

Jan 2016 · First Avenue Editions ™

About this ebook

An extraordinary look at an ordinary day—June 16, 1904—in the life of a middle-aged Jewish man living in Dublin, Ireland. Leopold Bloom, who is sure that his wife is being unfaithful, must come to terms with how that affects their marriage and whether it changes the nature of their love for one another. Richly detailed stream-of-consciousness narration immerses the reader in the thoughts and emotions of the characters as they deal with the normal events of daily life in Dublin, as well as grander issues like sexuality, prejudice, birth, and death. This is an unabridged version of Irish author James Joyce's groundbreaking modernist tale, which parallels Homer's Odyssey. It was first published serially in the American journal The Little Review between 1918 and 1921, and published in novel form in 1922 in Paris.

About the author

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, into a large Catholic family. Joyce was a very good pupil, studying poetics, languages, and philosophy at Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, and the Royal University in Dublin. Joyce taught school in Dalkey, Ireland, before marrying in 1904. Joyce lived in Zurich and Triest, teaching languages at Berlitz schools, and then settled in Paris in 1920 where he figured prominently in the Parisian literary scene, as witnessed by Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Joyce's collection of fine short stories, Dubliners, was published in 1914, to critical acclaim. Joyce's major works include A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Stephen Hero. Ulysses, published in 1922, is considered one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century. The book simply chronicles one day in the fictional life of Leopold Bloom, but it introduces stream of consciousness as a literary method and broaches many subjects controversial to its day. As avant-garde as Ulysses was, Finnegans Wake is even more challenging to the reader as an important modernist work. Joyce died just two years after its publication, in 1941.