Dubliners

Fifteen stories about ordinary Dubliners — a boy at a funeral, a clerk who beats his son, a woman who cannot make herself board the ship — arranged from childhood to old age and ending with “The Dead,” which is usually called the best short story in English. Nothing much happens in any of them on purpose; the form is the flat surface plus the single moment of recognition Joyce called an epiphany. It reads in a curriculum as the case for close attention: the whole meaning of these stories is carried by what characters notice and decline to say.

Context: James Joyce (1882-1941) finished the collection in 1907, but printers and publishers refused it for years over passages they feared were obscene or libellous; it finally appeared in 1914, before A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• James Joyce — the author.
• Literature — the form itself, and what this book did to it.