James Joyce

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people striving to get by.

Dubliners

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. (from wikipedia.org)

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning." James Joyce's supremely innovative fictional autobiography is also, in the apt phrase of the biographer Richard Ellmann, nothing less than "the gestation of a soul." For as he describes the shabby, cloying, and sometimes terrifying Dublin upbringing of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce immerses the reader in his emerging consciousness, employing language that ranges from baby talk to hellfire sermon to a triumphant artist's manifesto. The result is a novel of immense boldness, eloquence, and energy, a work that inaugurated a literary revolution and has become a model for the portrayal of the self in our time. The text of this edition has been newly edited by Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and is followed by a new afterword, chronology, and bibliography by Richard Brown.

Centennial Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Jolie Ann

Seamus Deane

Anisah Osman Britton

- Not the easiest of reads and wish I’d started it during the holidays as it needs focus and time

- I flicked back and forth from the notes to the narrative as there’s a lot of Irish historical context which took a bit away from the flow. 

- The religious descriptions are some of the best writing I’ve read. There’s a bit on sin and hell that I can’t get out of my mind. 

“He could scarcely recognize as his his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself: - I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.” 81

Arie P

A New Year's Eve gathering in Dublin is the setting of this elegant, accessible masterpiece that ends with a signature epiphany by the protagonist, who offers a perspective on the lives, dreams, and feelings of the party's guests. This beautifully packaged series of classic novellas includes the works of masterful writers. Inexpensive and collectible, they are the first single-volume publications of these classic tales, offering a closer look at this under-appreciated literary form and providing a fresh take on the world's most celebrated authors.

The Dead

“He asked himself, what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of.”

“One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, then fade and wither dismally with age.” 

Kat Albanese

“He asked himself, what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of.”

“One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, then fade and wither dismally with age.” 

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Roman Muradov

Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

I’m more than glad that this was my first foray into James Joyce. I think anyone who grew up around institutionalised religious structures will see many parallels with Stephen Dedalus and reflect on their own journey with faith alongside Stephen. The shift in narration as Stephen gets older was a great way to keep me engaged with story and the imagery that Joyce invokes is stunning and is both complex and simple. 

I do appreciate that this particular edition has a comprehensive notes section that does outline a lot of the historical context of Ireland in the late 19th Century that situates the plot better. 

Jasmine Lawrence

I’m more than glad that this was my first foray into James Joyce. I think anyone who grew up around institutionalised religious structures will see many parallels with Stephen Dedalus and reflect on their own journey with faith alongside Stephen. The shift in narration as Stephen gets older was a great way to keep me engaged with story and the imagery that Joyce invokes is stunning and is both complex and simple. 

I do appreciate that this particular edition has a comprehensive notes section that does outline a lot of the historical context of Ireland in the late 19th Century that situates the plot better. 

ivana

i really liked this! the dialogues are one of the best i have seen, and some of the descriptions will definitely stay with me for a while! the ending made me really sad. it was so bittersweet, in my opinion. i should definitely read the whole of "dubliners," as i like the short story "eveline" as well. 

"Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"

Retrato del artista adolescente

Luis Ponce

jack

loved most of these stories a lot but there were few that didn’t resonate, likely because they are so immersed in allusion to irish culture at the time. that’s not really a mark against the stories, but did hinder my enjoyment. araby, a little cloud, and a painful case are all insanely wonderful.

A portrait of the artist as a young man

i don’t think i’ve related to a character as much as this since watching truffaut’s antoine doinel movies. my experience reading this was littered with many “ah fuck..... i felt that so much during (x stage in my life).” crazy. at times this was a bit of an annoying read, especially the religious guilt of stephen during the middle of the book, but i think every time joyce writes these weirdly long tangent-seeming passages, they pay off completely in the experience they set up for stephen to feel. instantly one of my all time favorites, because of how much i can relate to it and how much i feel myself in stephen. also, reading this before going off to school far away and breaking the expectations of my family/prescribed life path feels very important. the last two paragraphs of the book will stay with me for a very long time. wonderful.

Feeling worried because I liked this. I cannot start to have an itch to read JAMES JOYCE. I JUST CANT.

jess

I drifted out of the pages and a few sentences later straight back in. They came at me from every side, how was I supposed to concentrate on one?

Oscar Kömpel

Dublineses/ Dubliners

Paula Villoria

Me encantan las descripciones, la escritura en general preciosa, me encanta cómo capta tu atención y te hace entrar tan profundamente en la historia con un solo párrafo. Y me da rabia acabar el capítulo y saber que ya no queda más de esa historia. Salir de forma tan abrupta para meterme de nuevo en otra me cuesta.

charisa

dry, slice-of-life miserablism set in ireland?? nothing seemed to happen and it wasn’t the slow meditative writing i’m usually into. basically, kinda boring oops. time for some FANTASY

Colum McCann

Terence Brown

"For the centennial of its original publication, an irresistible Graphic Deluxe Edition of one of the most beloved books of the 20th century Perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language, James Joyce's Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear dirty Dublin" at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as "Araby," "Grace," and "The Dead," delve into the heart of the city of Joyce's birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author's original wishes. "--

Wynter

My first Joyce! I think this is definitely a less intimidating place to start than let's say Ulysses. I liked the prose: its soft turns of phrase, bright imagery, rich vocabulary. I also liked the overall feeling of helplessness that ties all of the characters together. It's not a happy set of stories, but it's a pleasing kind of melancholy, where the audience can pause and think about all the hidden meanings. I had a hard time connecting to the themes, however, not being Irish or a contemporary of the author, so I believe I missed out on the subtle messages. I picked up a lot of resentment towards England, the desire to stand independent of the mighty neighbour, and the plight of working class, but I cannot say I understood it all or felt deeply moved at any point. There is a lot to think about in here, so writing a review so soon after reading the book might not be the best idea. Only time will tell if I would keep coming back to the Dubliners I briefly got to know.

Gavin

To use yourself for art you need a really interesting life, or sheer expressive skill - the ability to force anything to be interesting. Neither is easy: someone like Montaigne manages easily, but e.g. Rousseau doesn't (he just got there first, to the I Am Art game, so we have to talk about him).

Joyce's life is only mildly interesting from the outside, so it falls to his evocation. I read this to find out whether to care about him, and I actually didn't until Part III, the rightly famous spiritual arc from apatheistic teenage kicks, to the ecstatic shame of submitting to the vast closed Catholic system, and through it to passionate agnosticism, anticlerical naturalism. Joyce's is the best portrait of the Church's infinite terrorism:

  remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to do God’s holy will and to save our immortal souls. All else is worthless.



  As he crossed the square, walking homeward, the light laughter of a girl reached his burning ear. The frail, gay sound smote his heart more strongly than a trumpet blast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being. The image of Emma appeared before him and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils.


As a teen Stephen tries to mortify himself, to not look at women, to not eat well, to just look at the mud. But he's too bright, too worldly and too proud. I cheered at the end of Part IV, when he throws off the yoke.

The prose is port wine: lovely if sipped. It is mostly monologue but the dialogue is the best bit. He is passionate about anything, e.g. algebra - 

  The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.

The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the bale-fire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires. They were quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos.


The painful process of moving past family, nation, church, scholastic philosophy, to become yourself. Doing this in a country as maniacal about nation and church as eC20th Ireland was so much harder, and indeed he had to leave. He doesn't move past Art, and acquires a similarly monomanaical view of it -

  [To be an artist], a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life


but if my prose was as good as Joyce's maybe I couldn't have moved past it either. Like Nietzsche if he wasn't an edgelord.

That printers and governments treated Joyce and Lawrence the same is a laugh: Joyce has all of Lawrence's passion and none of the flat feet. Self-parody, odd humility, laughter at his own past dogmatism.

His memory - or his notetaking? - is amazing: scholars have spent lifetimes checking and relating everything in this to recorded history, and he's usually spot on about details (though he changes names). I don't think I could write anything as accurate, even in my surveillance society. 

Fully half of my edition was taken up in footnotes and bibliophilia. (It also left Joyce's typos in, which is a bit much. In fact half the footnotes were as trivial as typos, e.g. pointing out where lines are reused from his draft Stephen Hero.)

Portrait stops before the end of uni, before his odyssey, before his wife even. And much of the last section is a surprisingly flat, academic statement of Thomist aesthetics. But by then you've heard enough to love him anyway.

Willy

— The Dead 

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." 

Begitulah kalimat terakhir dari novela The Dead, yang ditulis oleh James Joyce dengan amat memukau. Barangkali, ini adalah salah satu titik terakhir (end-point) yang paling baik dari sebuah karya fiksi, setelah yang dilakukan Chales Dickens pada setengah abad sebelumnya lewat roman A Tale of Two Cities. 

The Dead—yang menjadi salah satu bagian dari kumpulan cerpen The Dubliners—menceritakan tentang acara perkumpulan para sanak keluarga di malam natal. Narasi dimulai dengan Gabriel sebagai tokoh utama, dan berlangsung dengan wajar selama 3/4 cerita: tidak banyak riak di permukaan, namun menyimpan rahasia yang begitu dalam yang kelak di bagian akhir akan diungkap oleh istri Gabril. Sekuens akhir tersebut sukses menjungkirbalikkan cerita yang telah dibangun dengan rapi menjadi akhir yang begitu emosional. 

Joyce banyak menyisipkan potret-potret masyarakat Dublin melalui dialog-dialog para tokoh yang bergumul tentang kebudayaan, seni, dan sejarah lokal. Kejeliaan mata Joyce dan kelihaian imajinasinya tersebut sukses membesarkan namanya sebagai salah satu sastrawan paling berpengaruh di Britania dengan mahakaryanya yang berjudul The Ulysses (1920) yang menjadi salah satu avant-garde sastra di masa itu.

Perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language, James Joyces' DUBLINERS is both a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear, dirty Dublin" at the turn of the century, and moral history of a nation and a people whose "golden age" has passed. 

From the opening story, "The Sisters," in which a boy first encounters death, to the powerful and evocative "The Dead," which brings the collection to its haunting climax, DUBLINERS startles the reader into realizing universal human truths in moments Joyce called epiphanies. And his richly drawn characters - at once intensely Irish and utterly universal - haunt us long after the first reading. In writing that never fails to provoke and mesmerize, Joyce takes us deep into the heart of the city of his birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech in remarkably realistic portrayals of their inner lives.

This magnificent collection of fifteen stories reveals Joyce at his most accessible and perhaps most profound.

(back cover)

Jamieson

2.5

not horrible, just not for me. I'm very picky with short story collections & this was not my preferred style. I prefer longer short stories, and I enjoyed Joyce's longer prose a lot more than this collection.

Ben Jenkins

It had some good lines here and there but overall the stories were unsatisfying.

Sarah N

Novela con una fuerte carga autobiográfica, publicada perdiódicamente entre 1914 y 1915 y finalmente como libro en 1916. El protagonista, Stephen Dedalus, alter ego de Joyce, relata episodios de su vida a través de evocaciones azarosas de su pensamiento que le llevan a topar una y otra vez con el catolicismo, el pecado, el sacrificio, la penitencia y lo socialmente adecuado.

Novel with a strong dose of autobiography. It recounts different episodes of the life of Stephen Dedalus, a life crossed by religion, sin, poetry.
It is written in the form of thoughts or memories which makes the narrative a bit fragmented. It is a very entertaining book. The way it is written allows you to easily generate an intimate relationship with the protagonist. The philosophical and religious debates of the character continue to be very relevant in modern times.

Carolina Grajales 

Colm Toibin

Not a fan of Joyce's pacing but I do like the way he describes things

B.H. Pitt

This is my first exposure to Joyce and wow--his use of language is stunning and beautiful. I thoroughly enjoyed getting lost in his diction and coming to understand the mind of young Stephen Dedalus. Made me miss Dublin.

On to Ulysses soon, I suppose.

Max Bodach

the intellectual journey portrayed here took me a while but i loved it - did not realize the nietzschean art appreciation until it was pointed out

Dubliners - James Joyce's stories of his native homeland - performed by a cast of 15 different actors originating from Ireland. Unabridged. The fifteen stories that make up this brilliant audio roam over a human landscape that stretches from the bleakest of despair to the most blinding of epiphanies. First published in 1914, the stories are as lucid and accessible as they are memorable poignant. As you listen to the cast of internationally famous stage and screen actors perform Dubliners, both the spiritually deadening atmosphere that drove Joyce from his homeland and the irresistible emotional pull it always kept on him to the end of his days become heartbreakingly beautiful. Dubliners is an audio experience that will only grow in richness with each time you listen. The stories and performers are: Sisters - Frank McCourt An Encounter - Patrick McCabe Araby - Colm Meaney Eveline - Dearbhla Molloy After the Race - Dan O'Herlihy Two Gallants - Malachy McCourt The Boarding House - Donal Donnelly A Little Cloud - Brendan Coyle Counterparts - Jim Norton Clay - Sorcha Cusack A Painful Case - Ciaran Hinds Ivy Day in the Committee Room - T.P. McKenna A Mother - Fionnula Flanagan Grace - Charles Keating The Dead - Stephen Rea

Melody Izard

I hate to even break the spell. The language. The things he says. And more importantly. The things he does not say. Here's a quote from The Sisters that sums it up: "I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences". 

The stink of Catholic guilt is present in each story. But so is the grace. I am flushed like a girl with a secret crush.

Dubliners

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