Dubliners

Fifteen short stories set in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century, capturing moments of paralysis, longing, and quiet revelation in the lives of ordinary people.

A boy waits too long at a bazaar and discovers the hollowness of romantic fantasy. A woman stands at a dockside, unable to board the ship that would carry her to a new life. A man attends a dinner party and realizes how little he knows about his own wife. Joyce wrote these stories with meticulous realism, using Dublin’s streets, pubs, and parlors as the stage for small but devastating epiphanies. The collection faced years of censorship battles before finally being published, with printers objecting to its frank portrayal of Irish life and its refusal to idealize the city Joyce had left behind.

James Joyce’s 1914 collection builds from childhood through adolescence to maturity, culminating in “The Dead” — widely regarded as one of the greatest short stories ever written.