Dubliners

A Masterful and Unflinching Portrait of Dublin Life

Dubliners by James Joyce is one of the most important short-story collections in the English language, a penetrating and beautifully observed portrait of life in early twentieth-century Dublin.

Completed in 1905, the collection faced years of difficulty before publication. A series of British and Irish publishers and printers considered the book offensive or immoral, and its appearance was repeatedly delayed. It was finally published in London in 1914, at the same time that Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began appearing in the journal The Egoist under the encouragement of Ezra Pound.

The fifteen stories in Dubliners move from childhood and adolescence to maturity, public life, disappointment, love, frustration, and death. The first stories can be read as closely connected to the world that Joyce would later develop in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, while several characters who later appear in Ulysses make their first appearance here.

Yet Dubliners is far more than a prelude to Joyce's later masterpieces. It stands on its own as an extraordinary literary achievement: precise, unsentimental, often tragic, and deeply attentive to the small moments that reveal the inner lives of ordinary people.

Beginning and ending with death, the collection gradually expands from intimate stories of childhood to broader portraits of social, cultural, and public life. Joyce described the work as part of a wider attempt to create a moral history of Ireland, and throughout the book he examines paralysis, disappointment, religion, family, politics, ambition, and the difficulty of escaping inherited circumstances.
The final story, The Dead, is widely regarded as one of the finest short stories ever written, bringing together many of the collection's central themes in a deeply moving meditation on memory, love, identity, and mortality.

This E-Bookarama Editions edition presents an essential classic of modern literature, ideal for readers of James Joyce, students of English literature, and anyone interested in short fiction, Irish culture, modernism, and the social history of Dublin. A brilliant, subtle, and enduring masterpiece.