Buy The Brambles and get Ulysses at an additional 5% off Amazon.com's everyday low price.

Buy Together Today: $28.94

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) by James Joyce  (233)  $8.00

Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford  (16)  $29.95

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by James Joyce  (192)  $13.60

Dubliners (Oxford World's Classics) by James Joyce  (104)  $9.95

The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses by Harry Blamires  (15)  $30.90

› Explore similar items : Books (50)

Amazon.com
Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus

The New York Times Book Review, Dr. Joseph Collins
Ulysses is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the 20th century. It will immortalize its author ... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

First Sentence:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Buck Mulligan, Martin Cunningham, Father Conmee, Corny Kelleher, Ned Lambert, Miss Douce, Ben Dollard, Cissy Caffrey, John Eglinton, Myles Crawford, John Wyse, Nosey Flynn, Father Cowley, Miss Kennedy, Davy Byrne, Bob Doran, O'Madden Burke, Paddy Dignam, Simon Dedalus, Edy Boardman, John Henry Menton, Bantam Lyons, Leopold Bloom, Tom Rochford, Paddy Leonard New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Search Inside This Book: