Dubliners

Fifteen linked stories move through the streets, pubs, and parlors of turn of the century Dublin, arranged to trace a rough progression from childhood through adolescence and adulthood into public life. Joyce writes ordinary, closely observed moments, a boy's disillusioning errand in Araby, a man's small domestic betrayal in Counterparts, that build toward what Joyce called an epiphany, a sudden private recognition his characters rarely act on even once they have it. The collection closes with The Dead, its longest and most fully developed piece, in which Gabriel Conroy attends a family Christmas party, delivers a comfortable after dinner speech, and then learns from his wife Gretta, on their way home, that a song sung that evening has revived her memory of a young man named Michael Furey who died, she believes, of love for her many years before. Gabriel spends the story's final pages alone with the knowledge that his own marriage has never held anything like that intensity, watching snow fall over Ireland in a passage that widens the story's private grief into something closer to a vision of the whole country.

Joyce writes in a precise, unadorned style that refuses the sentimental uplift Irish fiction of the period often reached for, letting paralysis, longing, and disappointment sit on the page without editorial comment. The stories read quickly on their surface but reward real attention to what goes unsaid; Joyce's characters routinely almost say the important thing and then do not, and noticing that gap is most of the book's actual work.

Joyce spent nearly a decade trying to get the collection published, submitting it eighteen times to fifteen publishers, and one Dublin printer went so far as to burn the typeset sheets of an early edition over fears the stories libeled real people and places.