Dubliners

Description

The new paperback series- Penguin English Library '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' 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 just how little he really knows about his wife, these fifteen stories bring the gritty realism of existence in Joyce's native Dublin to life. With Dubliners, James Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental.

James Joyce (1882-1941) was born in Dublin, the eldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. Nonetheless educated at the best Jesuit schools and at University College, Dublin, he moved to Paris in 1902 to attend medical school. Soon giving up on his lectures, however, he devoted himself to writing poems and prose sketches, aiming 'to give some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment' and comparing this process to 'the mystery of the Mass'. After living in Trieste for almost ten years with the Irish woman Nora Barnacle, he published Dubliners in 1914, going on to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Exiles in Zurich during the First World War. After the armistice he returned to Trieste briefly before moving to Paris, where he published Ulysses in 1922, bringing him international fame. Struggling through eye troubles and his daughter's mental illness, he completed and published Finnegans Wake in 1939. He died in Zurich two years later.