For anyone considering adding James Joyce to their “must read this year” list for 2019, here are my suggestions.

First, there's “Dubliners.” These are brilliantly atmospheric snippets of Irish miserablism. It's a must-read to understand where Joyce is coming from.

Next, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Strangely, it can be tiresome and inessential. It goes on about religion and more Irish miserablism, and it's a bit too much like a portrait of the author as an insufferable young genius.

Then, there's “Ulysses.” This is the essential book among these. It's difficult but also very funny and not impossible to read. I have a short bluffer’s guide and a long review (chapter by chapter) of this astonishing book.

Finally, “Finnegans Wake.” This is really not recommended. However, there is a 10-minute excerpt (“Anna Livia Plurabelle”) read by Joyce himself. I thought this small part was so beautiful that the whole book would be a masterpiece, but the rest of it isn't nearly as fascinating or linguistically lovely, and it will do your brain in.

In addition to Joyce's works, there are some books about him that are worth mentioning. “The Most Dangerous Book : The Battle For James Joyce’s Ulysses” by Kevin Birmingham is by far the best book on Joyce and “Ulysses” that I've ever read. It's a total page-turner. “James Joyce” by Richard Ellman is a great biography if you want a more in-depth look. “My Brother’s Keeper” by Stanislaus Joyce is a memoir by Joyce's faithful brother that will make you love him (and Stanny) more.

There are also some books about “Ulysses” that I liked. “The New Bloomsday Book” by Harry Blamires is a not-too-scholarly voyage through and about “Ulysses” that I preferred to other analyses. “The Finnegans Wake Experience” by Roland McHugh is hilarious. Mr McHugh is a total obsessive who dedicated his whole being to reading and explaining “Finnegans Wake.”

However, there are some books that I would avoid. “Ulysses and Us” by Declan Kiberd and “Ulysses on the Liffey” by Richard Ellman do the same thing – they make you want to burn down the English Literature department with their jaw-breaking pontificating and somnambulating rambling. “Ulysses Annotated” by Don Gifford proves that the more you know, the less you understand.

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The passage about the cocklepickers and the dog adds a touch of vividness and perhaps a bit of humor to the overall piece.

And the quote “How many roads must a man walk down....” is a nice addition, even if it's a bit of a dig at Joyce.

I read James Joyce's Dubliners several years ago. At that time, I had a great penchant for reading short stories. And truly, I was completely enamored with every single one of the stories in "Dubliners".

Joyce's writing in this collection is simply masterful. He has an uncanny ability to capture the essence of life in Dublin, with all its joys, sorrows, and mundanities. Each story is like a small window into the lives of the characters, and we get to see their hopes, dreams, and disappointments.

The characters in "Dubliners" are vividly drawn and completely believable. Joyce makes us care about them, even when they are making poor choices or facing difficult situations. I found myself completely immersed in their worlds, and I was sorry to see the collection end. Overall, I would highly recommend "Dubliners" to anyone who loves great literature. It is a 5-star read that will stay with you long after you have turned the last page.

Dubliners is a remarkable collection of short stories that was published in 1914. The concluding story, The Dead, is highly regarded, with the blurb on GR citing it as “the best short story ever written.”

In a brief introduction, we are informed that Joyce was a pioneer in popularizing the structure of the modern short story, which is focused on “a fleeting but decisive episode.” Elsewhere, I have read that the focus of the modern short story is described as 'the moment.'

The question then arises: is The Dead truly the greatest short story ever written? I would like to offer my two cents. I first read it 50 years ago in college, and I still remember it vividly, as if I had read it yesterday. This is in contrast to many of the hundreds of short stories I have read since then.

Many of the stories in Dubliners are quite short, only four or five pages in length. Here are a few samples. In The Sisters, the brother, a priest, dies at home, and the question is raised as to whether it was because he broke a chalice during mass shortly before his death. In An Encounter, two boys play hooky from school and encounter a strange man whose conversation makes it seem as if he might be a molester. In Araby, a young boy lives in a house where a priest recently died and is frustrated in his attempt to buy a present at a bazaar for his puppy love.

Some of the stories in Dubliners have a modern outlook, addressing issues such as feminism and racism. The Dead touches on both of these issues during a conversation around the Christmas table. An elderly aunt is furious about boys getting preference over girls in a choir, and a man at the table raises the issue of no one appreciating a great tenor because he is black. The story A Mother focuses on a dispute over a payment for her daughter singing in a choir, with the mother lamenting that they wouldn't have treated her daughter like that if she had been a man.

The pictures added to this article, such as those of Grafton Street in Dublin in the early 1900s, a still from a movie made of The Dead, and a postcard of Dublin in the 1920s, provide a visual context for the stories. Overall, Dubliners is a collection of short stories that offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives and times of the people of Dublin.

An early work by Joyce, dating back to 1914, is a collection consisting of 15 short stories. While it may not boast masterpieces in the traditional sense (except for the remarkable 'The Dead'), it does showcase solid craftsmanship. The stories are replete with numerous Catholic references, and there is an obvious and profound link with Dublin. In each story, a shocking event is evoked for the central character, adding an element of drama and intensity. However, it is the longer essay 'The Dead' that truly stands out. It is sublime and dazzling, serving as undeniable proof of Joyce's literary genius. The beauty and depth of this particular piece are simply captivating, leaving a lasting impression on the reader.

Life is replete with missed opportunities and arduous decisions. At times, it proves to be extremely challenging to determine what one should actually do.

Dubliners constructs an image of a perpetually bustling city, a place of constant movement and exchange among people who experience the raw reality of life. And that is precisely the essence: realism. Not everything unfolds smoothly; not everything is flawlessly fabricated. Life is capricious and unpredictable. If we are not vigilant, it might elude us completely.

There are two kinds of stories in Dubliners. The first, and by far the most impactful, are those related to despair, nihilism, and death. The second type pertains to more ordinary facets of modern life, such as the portrayal of the city and social interactions. As a collection, they offer a depiction of a dark, murky city grappling with the issues associated with rapid urbanization. The stories do not interweave, yet one is left with the impression that they are not too distant from each other: their proximity seems palpable as one delves deeper into each one.

The true expertise of Joyce's writing manifests itself in what he leaves unsaid, the delicate suggestions, the lingering questions, as each story concludes without a sense of complete resolution. And, once again, is this not an accurate reflection of real life? In the narrative tradition, there is a structured beginning, middle, and end, but in the actuality of existence, it does not function in such a manner. Life persists. It does not possess a form of narrative closure, a convenient tying up of the plot, after each setback we encounter in life. It continues. We persevere. And for the Dubliners, isolation endures.

\\n  “He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.” \\n

I suppose I've always had the intention to read Joyce. It's an extremely daunting task, yet it also seems inevitable that I must follow the man all the way through to Finnegans Wake. I own a copy, but it remains untouched. It's yet another remnant of the days when I thought I was on Earth to prove some kind of a point.

However, I'm still awfully curious, and this year I finally took the first step. Dubliners came first as it seemed the easiest to begin with, and I'd already read a story or two of it. Indeed, it is rather conventional, even self-consciously spare in style.

But it is also masterful and instantly captivating. If I were a more serious student of literature, I suppose I would know to what extent Joyce is adhering to the narrative mode of the existing literature in his world in 1911, and to what extent he is employing narrative devices that are familiar to me only because later writers imitated him. Writing is a series of choices, details selected from an infinite number of omitted details, and no matter how concise, flat, and neutral the style, Joyce continuously manages to regain your attention with virtually every phrase, wasting nothing. Here is part of a character introduction from A Painful Case:

His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave alms to beggars and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.

The stories often seem to be mainly character sketches or exercises in placing ultimately regrettable behaviors in their context to explore and explain them. An ambitious youth goes to foolish extremes to live for a night in the style of cosmopolitan foreigners. A conniving matron bullies her daughter's beau into a marriage he doesn't desire. A mousy, straitlaced man, suddenly feeling trapped in a dull and shameful life, commits a minor, real, mean act, immediately regretted; the next story puts this into perspective with the narrative of a day leading up to outright cruelty.

These themes pervade the book. In fact, Dublin is dull and shameful; Dubliners long to leave but are unable to. And through all the obstacles of church, class, and poverty that haunt them all, drunkenness recurs again and again, prominent in nearly every story. Some reading outside the text reveals that Joyce, extremely particular about every detail of his writing, intended the book as a moral indictment of the people of Dublin and of Ireland as a whole. In fact, he left Dublin forever shortly after the book's publication, settling in France where he wrote the rest of his works. So, in an important sense, this book isn't meant for me, and it's hard to know how much Joyce was relying on images and phrases that Dubliners of his day would have found familiar, beyond the occasional Irish word or idiom that I can't quite understand. And it is largely a condemnation, in the end, of the city and its people. I can't say whether he meant the book - his parting shot to his native country - to shed light on Dublin's problems and inspire people to improve them, or if he thought his countrymen were hopeless and just had to tell them how much they annoyed him.

Finally, in The Dead, the narrative more or less directly confronts this underlying discontent. Gabriel Conroy is not so different from Joyce himself: an urbane, cultured writer with one foot out of Ireland and a clear discomfort even with visiting it for the holidays. He is a subtle and likable character, sympathetically portrayed. But when a young woman calls him out for his alienation from his own country, he is too easily shaken; so deep is his discomfort with his home that he cannot stop himself from exclaiming, "I'm sick of my own country, sick of it!" Why, she asks him, and then: "of course, you've no answer." Indeed he hasn't.

Does Joyce? Is he putting himself in the spotlight here and admitting that he doesn't really have an answer either? Or if he described his own book as a moral index of his country, should we take its chapters as a proxy answer for Gabriel Conroy: that he, and his author, are sick of Ireland because everyone there is mired in poverty, alcohol, and the parochial concerns of their little lives? It's difficult to tell here whether Joyce judges the conversation in favor of Gabriel, who seems evasive and troubled in his conscience, or Miss Ivors, who may be impolitic but who has Gabriel figured out. What is clear from Joyce's own life is that Gabriel is the one he must identify with. In his Dublin, every character either longs to escape "dirty old Dublin" or is plainly presented as small-minded in some way. They're all sick of it, and Joyce can't quite clarify why. At least not clearly enough for this reader, a hundred years later.

All that being said, it's an excellent read. It's one of those cases where the canons of the ivory-tower literati are so powerfully vindicated that I worry whether I should just accept their judgments every time. Dubliners is so powerful and confident that I have to give it five stars just for its execution. But the message - I guess the message might just not be meant for the likes of me.

The classification of books based on the Persian calendar is not customary for me. I haven't set any rules or procedures for this either. But fifteen days ago, when I got hold of "Dubliners" and decided to read one of its stories one day, I knew very well that this collection would be Hassan Khatami's in 1401.

"Dubliners" is a collection of short stories, consisting of fifteen stories named: "Sisters", "An Encounter", "Araby", "Eveline", "After the Race", "Two Gallants", "The Boarding House", "A Little Cloud", "Counterparts", "A Painful Case", "Ivy Day in the Committee Room", "A Mother", "Grace", and "The Dead".

On the surface, there is no connection between the stories and the characters of Joyce in these fifteen stories. But after reading the stories in the order they appear in the book, the reader can well understand why Joyce was so obsessed with the order of his stories.

Like any collection, this one also has excellent, good, average, and weak stories. So the reader shouldn't expect that just because the name of the author is such that even the British Nobel laureates can't touch it, he will be faced with fifteen excellent stories.

The highlight of this collection is the last story, "The Dead". This story is very well-known among Iranian readers. This popularity also made it the first story I read from Joyce and also encouraged me to buy a book from him.

Note: Some time ago, before I went to any bookstore, I got hold of Joyce's "Ulysses" and flipped through it. A quick glance was enough for me to say to myself: Now is not the time, maybe in 2024...

Joyce's pen in "Ulysses" was complex, mysterious, and full of literary intricacies. When I sat down for a short conversation with a bookseller, he said: Joyce's language is not our language! Of course, he is also a Briton, but the Irish today use expressions and terms that we don't, let alone in Joyce's time. He suggested to me that before I embark on this terrifying "Ulysses", I should read some of his short stories for a while to learn his turns of phrase and some of his specific expressions. Considering that several characters from "Dubliners" are present in "Ulysses", I bought this book with his guidance.

Joyce's pen in this collection had no relation to what I saw in "Ulysses"! It was simple and smooth! Yes, of course, many times I had to ask the locals the meaning of some words and terms, but these things didn't stop me, and most importantly, his sentences didn't have literary complexity...

It seems that Joyce only ties his efforts to confusing readers in "Ulysses".

Therefore, the Iranian reader shouldn't be afraid of the name Joyce. Just as those who have made Faulkner a terrifying Lolita for Iranian readers are also afraid of Joyce. Believe me, neither reading Faulkner is difficult nor Joyce. Of course, everything has its difficulties, but for a reader, fear of the author is meaningless.

Joyce has many concerns and is worried about his country. He is worried about the social, economic, and political situation of his people. The title of his book is "Dubliners" because everything is for the Dubliners... You will find everything related to the Irish people in these fifteen stories. If the reader reads the stories, he will feel that he has lived in Dublin for a while.

Joyce's characters and their stories were such that it seemed that in each story, he had inserted his personal memories and experiences into the stories, and this feeling was so alive that from the first story to the end of it, it seemed that Joyce was growing from childhood to adulthood and maturity.

Joyce refers to the traditional fabric of society to address social issues, to the streets, markets, and people's homes for economic awakening, and finally to political allegories for the awakening of the specific political issue of Irish independence.

Joyce pointed his accusing finger at anything that threatened his people... whether it was England or the Church. He is neither a self-censoring author nor an author who will be appeased and silenced with money.

All my words became a description! And it doesn't seem like a bad criticism... Of course, by reading one book by an author, one can't get to know him well. But Joyce's political views were ambiguous for me in this book! Mr. Joyce, if only you would express your heart without any cover-up as to whether you had a great British or Irish unity in the English group or not... Of course, maybe my expectation is in vain. An author who doesn't write stories to familiarize the reader with his political ideas may simply want to remain neutral between England and Ireland with this ambiguity!

Link to the EPUB file of the "Dubliners" collectionhttps://t.me/reviewsbysoheil/610

Twenty-ninth of Esfand, 1401

Araby and The Dead are perhaps two of the finest short stories ever penned. However, aside from these two remarkable pieces, nothing else in this collection truly caught my attention. Joyce's prose is a curious blend of excellence and being somewhat dated. At times, it was a source of great enjoyment for me, as I could appreciate the beauty and artistry of his language. But at other moments, it felt a bit too archaic or convoluted.

In general, I have a penchant for accessible books that are easy to understand and engage with. While these stories are not as impenetrable as Finnegans Wake, they still contain a level of symbolism that was a bit too much for my personal taste. Additionally, the plots and character personalities often seemed a bit too thin or underdeveloped to fully hold my interest.

Overall, while there are certainly some gems in this collection, it didn't quite live up to my expectations. I can see the value and importance of Joyce's work, but it just didn't resonate with me on a deep level.

For myself, I have always been drawn to writing about Dublin. As James Joyce so eloquently put it, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." Dubliners serves as a truly fantastic literary inspiration. It has compelled me to pay closer attention to my surroundings, to my own city, which holds an untapped and endless source of heartbreak, joy, turmoil, and everything else related to the human predicament. It has even almost coerced me to park myself anywhere and pen something of worth, but that's a different tale, one that I hope to share someday.

What are my thoughts on Joyce? There is no doubt that the man is a genius. He masterfully accomplishes what he sets out to do. He lays Dublin bare, revealing its true essence. His writing is powerful, unassuming, and free from judgment. Reading his stories can often be emotionally exhausting and, at times, soul-crushing if you manage to fully immerse yourself in them. This can be a challenging task, considering the colloquial language and the quotidian, sparse yet highly representative plot lines. It is truly awe-inspiring to witness how he delineates the intricacies of character interplay mainly through authentic dialogue.

The protagonists in the book age as the narrative progresses. So, while the first story is told from the perspective of a seven-year-old child, the final story, "The Dead," is recognizably about death and old age and is his most famous short story. Through these characters from diverse backgrounds and age groups, he paints a realistic and stark picture of Dublin. There are also stories told in the first person, where he gets beneath the skin of the characters incredibly well. "A Painful Case" is a prime example and my favorite story.

All in all, Dubliners is a necessary addition to any book lover's collection.

I must admit that I had no clear idea of what to anticipate from this compilation of vignettes. As it turns out, at least for me, they possess a more contemporary style compared to the period when they were written (1904 - 07) or published (1914).

They are rather 'gritty', with swear words and不良行为 on full display in a manner that I had not foreseen. I believe this is precisely what made it an engaging read.

The stories are, for the most part, brief snapshots of the daily lives of Dublin's less affluent classes - the way they go about their lives and interact with one another. They plot and betray, and find ways to circumvent the law and the moral expectations placed upon them.

There are also numerous sayings and idioms that are still in use today in Dublin specifically, and perhaps throughout all of Ireland - yet another factor that contributed to my overall enjoyment of this work. Personally, I can't help but get a thrill from recognizing a street name or even a suburb from the few years I resided in Dublin.

4 stars.

Ulysses, this book holds within it all of James Joyce's literature. If the stories are looked at one by one, they can be evaluated differently, but we know that Joyce designed it as a whole. Perhaps it is more correct to read and evaluate Dubliners like a novel rather than seeing it as a collection of stories.

Dubliners is also a book that becomes more beautiful as it is read again and as one thinks about it. Due to its structure, there are details in the stories that do not contain shocking or curious elements and are waiting to be noticed. The characters, each one, and the things each one does and thinks are remarkable.

One must see and understand Joyce's city, the people of the city, and how he saw, understood, and told the world and humanity from there.

The Dubliners collection by James Joyce, an Irish writer, is regarded as one of the outstanding books of modernist works.

Among the Dubliners collection, the story of "The Dead" was remarkable.

The story of "The Dead" with its themes of death and scattered symbols evokes one of the most innovative narrative styles to the reader, which had not existed in the English fictional literature until then.

The living who are in the memory of the dead and the dead who are in the memory of the living create a contradiction within the theme of the story.