Best Selling Books by James Joyce

A semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916. It tells the story of Stephen Dedalus''s childhood and youth in Dublin; his quest for identity through art, and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself. It is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist''s ''eternal imagination''.

A modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 and then published in its entirety in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce''s 40th birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement. According to Declan Kiberd, "Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking". Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer''s epic poem the Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, in addition to events and themes of the early 20th-century context of modernism, Dublin, and Ireland''s relationship to Britain. The novel is highly allusive and also imitates the styles of different periods of English literature.

Joyce''s Dubliners, there are two types of critics that are often at the forefront of the conversation: the "Realists" and the "Symbolists". The Realists view Dubliners as the most simple of Joyce''s works, which often causes them to disregard the revolutionary nature of the work. The symbolists instead neglect the rebellious meanings behind Joyce''s symbols. While some choose only one side to argue, others believe that Dubliners completely defies any form of characterization. Without any clear evidence of thematic unity, logic of plot, or closure, Joyce prevents any conclusive critical analysis. As Sonja Basic argues, the book "should be seen not just as a realist/naturalist masterpiece, but as a significant stepping- stone integrated into the modernist structure of Joyce''s mature work.

I am concurrently reading two enormously stimulating and intellectually challenging books - both of which I can recommend strenuously - My Bright Abyss and Holy Desperation. Each of these, distinctly different and imperiously individualistic, is by a writer who takes James Joyce''s commandment to become the conscience of our race at face value. Each does that differently - the former by a disinterested poetic conscience - and the latter by a socially committed religious conscience. But each is - or has been for most of their life - a pariah. A castoff from suburbia. If you eschew the usual head games and (slightly more outré) games of concupiscence suburbia tends to excel at, you are likely one of us. I say us, for with this book, like they with theirs, I first became a Stephen Dedalus. The three of us may fake some kind of obedience to the norm, but our hearts will always be in those mystical epiphanic moments which make life worthwhile: those rare moments which are intimations of immortality, as Wordsworth puts it. When life is a religious experience it is worthwhile. And it has to be a life of timeless moments. A day without the maximum effort it takes to generate an epiphanic moment (or much better, a SHARED epiphanic moment) is a day not lived. Joyce knew that. And he knew he could no longer make Ireland his home. For Ireland back at the turn of the century was ruled by a malicious devil - which Plato calls doksa, or opinion - the symptom of a stagnant society in ferment. When a land is dangerously deadlocked - as we have witnessed in our own time - that same violent devil, doksa, rears its head: and we get viciously vapid tweets masquerading as moral substance. But Suburbia rarely confronts, but festers. Hence its release valve, in games. However, to outcasts from conformity like James Joyce, Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss) and Heather King (Holy Desperation) we must CHANGE. We must become Self-Aware. And more importantly than that, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, we must have faith. Have faith that change is possible; Have faith that WE can promote Change through Awakeness; Have faith that the Kingdom is at Hand: AND have faith that all our literary epiphanies PROVE it.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialized in The Egoist from 1914 to 1915 and published in book form in 1916. It depicts the formative years in the life of Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and a pointed allusion to the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology, Daedalus. A Portrait is a key example of the Künstlerroman (an artist''s bildungsroman) in English literature. Joyce''s novel traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions he has been brought up in. He finally leaves for Paris to pursue his calling as an artist. The work pioneers some of Joyce''s modernist techniques that would later come to fruition in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The Modern Library ranked Portrait as the third greatest English-language novel of the twentieth century.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was first published in serial form in the Egoist in the years 1914-15. Chronicling the life of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to young adulthood and his life-changing decision to leave Ireland, the novel is profoundly autobiographical. Like Stephen, Joyce had early experiences with prostitutes during his teenage years and struggled with questions of faith. Like Stephen, Joyce was the son of a religious mother and a financially inept father. Like Stephen, Joyce was the eldest of ten children and received his education at Jesuit schools. Like Stephen, Joyce left Ireland to pursue the life of a poet and writer. Joyce began working on the stories that formed the foundation of the novel as early as 1903, after the death of is mother. Previous to the publication of Portrait, Joyce had published several stories under the pseudonym "Stephen Dedalus."

Beschrijving van achttien episoden uit een dag in het leven van een joodse advertentiecolporteur in Dublin in het jaar 1904, analoog aan de "Odyssee" van Homerus.