Dubliners - (Vintage Classics) by James Joyce (Paperback)

About the Book

In these masterful stories, steeped in realism, Joyce creates an exacting portrait of his native city, showing how it reflects the general decline of Irish culture and civilization. Joyce compels attention by the power of its unique vision of the world, its controlling sense of the truths of human experience.

Book Synopsis

This Vintage Classics edition of James Joyce's groundbreaking story collection has been authoritatively edited by scholars Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and includes a chronology, bibliography, and afterword by John S. Kelly. Also included in a special appendix are the original versions of three of the stories as well as Joyce's long-suppressed preface to Dubliners.

With the fifteen stories in Dubliners Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest ("The Sisters"), the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of "Two Gallants," or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife ("The Dead"), Joyce takes narrative art to places it had never been before.

Review Quotes

"In Dubliners, Joyce's first attempt to register in language and fictive form the protean complexities of the 'reality of experience, ' he learns the paradoxical lesson that only through the most rigorous economy, only by concentrating on the minutest of particulars, can he have any hope of engaging with the immensity of the world."-from the Introduction

"Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things." -Atlantic Monthly

"It is in the prose of Dubliners that we first hear the authentic rhythms of Joyce the poet...Dubliners is, in a very real sense, the foundation of Joyce's art. In shaping its stories, he developed that mastery of naturalistic detail and symbolic design which is the hallmark of his mature fiction." -Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, authors of Dubliners: Text and Criticism

With an Introduction by John Kelly

About the Author

James Joyce, the twentieth century's most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. After receiving a rigorous Jesuit education, twenty-year-old Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin in 1902 to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. His writings include Chamber Music (1907), Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Exiles (1918), Ulysses (1922), Pomes Penyeach (1927), Finnegan's Wake (1939), and an early draft of A Portrait of a Young Man, Stephan Hero (1944). Ulysses required seven years to complete, and his masterpiece, Finnegan's Wake, took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.