Dubliners

First published in June 1914, 'Dubliners' depicts Dublin's middle class at the turn of the 20th century in 15 short stories by James Joyce, an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, and literary critic. It is Joyce's literary debut, which he struggled to publish in the face of multiple rejections from multiple publishers. The stories are organized by the age of their subjects, in ascending order from youngest to oldest. Each story—amid trickery, courtship, religion, family, and death- pinnacles in a character's epiphany or moment of self-understanding. The forerunner of Joyce's masterwork Ulysses, it features characters who make cameo appearances in the later novel, as well as stylistic choices that came to define Joyce's style. And while each story can be read individually as a stellar sample of Joyce's work, together they form a novel in stories—one of the first of its kind—by one of the 20th century's most important writers.