Ulysses
- Written By James Joyce
Ulysses
- James Joyce
$19.99
The Odyssey reborn in the pulse of a single day.
Leopold Bloom rises early on a Thursday morning in June as his wife, Molly, lies in bed. He makes breakfast, attends a funeral, walks the length of Dublin, drinks, argues, wanders. The young, unmoored Stephen Dedalus meanwhile moves through the same city, on a collision course with the man he doesn’t know he’s looking for. By nightfall, their paths will cross โ briefly, imperfectly, with consequences neither can name or escape.
What happens between morning and midnight is both ordinary and inexhaustible: a bar argument, a beach reverie, a maternity ward, a brothel, a late-night cup of cocoa shared between near-strangers. The stakes are interior and absolute. Bloom quietly carries his grief, and Stephen nurses ambition like a wound. Joyce tracks it all with a prose that shifts from the lyric and satirical to encyclopedic and even hallucinatory โ always pressing against the limits of what a sentence, and a mind, can hold.
Ulysses shadows the oldest journey in Western literature โ Odysseusโs epic return across a โwine-dark seaโ โ compressing that entire classic voyage into the psychological landscape of a single Dublin day. The heroism is small but stubborn: to keep moving, to stay human, to return home. Joyce built his twentieth-century novel around this premise, and its architecture still stands.
โThink you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.โ
About the Author
- James Joyce
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest surviving child of a charming, feckless father and a devout mother, whose death would haunt his work for decades. While Joyce rejected the Catholic doctrine of his upbringing, his Jesuit teachers deeply shaped his imagination and his craft. He left Ireland in 1904, the year in which Ulysses is set, with his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle. While the couple moved between Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, Dublin remained the gravitational center of Joyceโs major novels.
Between 1918 and 1920, Ulysses was partially serialized in the American literary magazine The Little Review, and promptly prosecuted for obscenity. After Shakespeare and Company, Paris, published the first complete edition (on February 2, 1922 โ Joyce’s 40th birthday), the United States and the United Kingdom both banned the book for years. Joyce spent the following decade going progressively blind and writing his final work, Finneganโs Wake. He died in Zurich in January 1941.
Literary scholars have dubbed Ulysses โthe greatest novel in Englishโ so often the claim feels empty โ until you read it, and it fills back up. The novel didnโt invent stream of consciousness, the unreliable narrator, or the allusive novel, but it drove each to new extremes, and fiction has been working in its shadow ever since.
