Ulysses
One day in Dublin, June 1904: a Jewish advertising canvasser named Bloom walks around the city, and a young writer named Stephen drinks, argues and mourns. Nothing much happens, and everything does. Each of the eighteen episodes adopts a different technique, from newspaper headlines to a catechism to a long unpunctuated monologue.
It is a difficult book, but it is also a comic one, full of songs, advertisements and bad jokes. The usual advice is to read it with a guide the first time and stop worrying about what you are missing. What remains after the difficulty is a portrait of a marriage and a city, both treated with unusual tenderness.
Public-domain status
First published in 1922. 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. 4300 — 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
- Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf, 1925
- Dubliners — James Joyce, 1914
- Dublin — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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