James Joyce

  • Following Ulysses

    To what extent am I reading Ulysses by following Ulysses Reader? What does “reading” even mean at this point, given our near-constant engagement with text? Over at Full Stop, Dustin Illingworth describes his relationship with Ulysses Reader, a Twitter account…

  • Finding Dublin in Joyce’s Dubliners

    Why would a writer elicit that kind of hatred? What kind of threat did he pose? I asked my dad if I could borrow a copy of Ulysses, went to my room and began to read. An hour later I…

  • (Not Really) Pleased To Meet You

    The narrative of the encounter between James Joyce and Marcel Proust gets another tile added to its mosaic. Over at the London Review of Books blog, Ben Jackson reports on the legendary meeting as told by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife…

  • Author Selling Postcards Written in Blood

    Writing a novel requires plenty of time, and Irish author Julian Gough is hoping to fund that time with a Kickstarter campaign he has dubbed Litcoin. For small amounts of money, Gough will send contributors postcards stained with whiskey, coffee,…

  • The Syphilis Code

    A deep meditation on whatever it was that plagued James Joyce. For some, the uncertainty surrounding Joyce’s condition has turned the issue into his most captivating puzzle. Erik Schneider, an independent scholar, became particularly fascinated. Schneider had dropped out of the…

  • Ulysses: The Video Game

    The game is currently in the development and crowdfunding stage, but it already looks pretty interesting, even psychedelic. Its title, In Ulysses: Proteus, comes from the chapter of the novel that it tackles. In it, Dedalus wanders across a desolate…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    Monday marked Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s 732-page day-in-a-book, Ulysses. While this is hardly short fiction, Joyce is also often credited as one of the earliest practitioners of the epiphany, a technique that still burns bright in short…

  • Famed Ulysses Pharmacy Faces Taxman

    Sweny’s, the pharmacy made famous in Joyce’s Ulysses (when Leopold Bloom visits the Dublin shop to purchase lotion and soap for his wife Molly), opened more than 167 years ago and has remained more or less unchanged for most of that…

  • One Hundred Years of Dublin

    Gather round, ye James Joyce devotees: Mark O’Connell has an essay (replete with some pretty nifty info-graphics) up at Salon on the Dublin of the past and present: Everyone in Dubliners is thinking about a way out, if not actively pursuing one; everyone is dreaming of some…

  • Public (Image) Domain

    What happens when the reproduction rights of literary works and an author’s public image are taken out of their owner’s control, but without any law infringement? Over at the Paris Review, Evan Kindley tries to find out. He compares the case…

  • Where Betty Byrne Lived

    Story is an integral part of the city of Dublin. Bronze statues of beloved writers roam the landscape, immortal: Wilde lounges “languidly on a crag in the park at Merrion Square,” while Joyce is “depicted rather more severely in bronze, leaning on his cane…

  • Joyce Proves as Difficult to Translate as to Read

    The first of three parts of a Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake consumed eight years of translator Dai Congrong’s life. The almost unreadable book proves even more difficult to translate because of the many puns and layered meanings, explains MobyLives: The…