Dubliners

A boy keeps vigil over a dying priest; a girl stands frozen at the dockside, unable to board the boat that would carry her to a new life; a clerk drinks away his disappointment and strikes his child; a lonely man learns, too late, that he has shut himself out of “life's feast.” In fifteen short stories set in the streets, pubs, boarding houses, and parlours of turn-of-the-century Dublin, James Joyce portrays the ordinary life of his native city with a clarity and a tenderness no writer had attempted before.

Arranged as a deliberate sequence — through childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life — Dubliners builds toward “The Dead,” the long final story, in which Gabriel Conroy passes through an evening of music and small humiliations into a shattering self-knowledge, while the snow falls “upon all the living and the dead.” It is widely held to be one of the finest short stories in the English language.

Written in Joyce's self-described “style of scrupulous meanness” and built around the moment he called the epiphany — a sudden revelation of meaning — these stories take Dublin as their great subject and paralysis as their theme: the longing to escape, and the failure to move. Famously delayed nine years by frightened publishers, Dubliners stands at the threshold of literary modernism and just before Ulysses; it is at once Joyce's most accessible book and a complete masterpiece in itself.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on the book's embattled publication, its design, and its technique, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.