Words from the achiever
“I think I was about 12 or 13 and my sister gave me a copy of James Joyce’s story collection Dubliners. I was amazed to discover that fiction could be about life as I knew it. Here was writing that wasn’t a crime novel or a schoolyard or a Wild West story. This was about ordinary, gray life. But by the power of imagination and the power of language, Joyce showed the ordinary to be utterly extraordinary, as it is. Joyce said, and I agree with him, he said, ‘I’ve never met an ordinary person.’ Nor have I.”
About the book
Perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language, James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as “Araby,” “Grace,” and “The Dead,” delve into the heart of the city of Joyce’s birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners’ speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound