Dubliners
Fifteen stories, arranged in a sequence that moves from childhood to public life, all set in the same city. Joyce said he was writing a chapter of the moral history of Ireland, and the word he kept using was paralysis: people who know what they should do and cannot do it.
The prose is plain compared with what came later, but nothing is accidental. A coin, a window, a song lyric carries the weight that the characters cannot articulate. 'The Dead' is the longest story and the one everyone remembers, but read the collection in order; the earlier stories teach you how to read it.
Public-domain status
First published in 1914. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; James Joyce died in 1941, so this work has been free to republish there since 2012.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 2814 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde, 1890
- Dracula — Bram Stoker, 1897
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce, 1916
- Ulysses — James Joyce, 1922
- Dublin — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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