Presenting Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce with illustrations by Nicholas Tamblyn and Katherine Eglund. These classics are part of The Great Books Series by Golding Books.
A singular author in the domains of Irish fiction and world literature, James Joyce has captivated and beguiled (and bemused) readers for more than a century. Arguably, his most accessible work is Dubliners, a favorite of many writers and readers who prefer a "straight" style to the recurrent stylistic obtuseness and conscious cleverness of later works Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has both more realist and fantastic or stylistically difficult elements, which includes its memorably unusual opening.
No book of Irish short stories is as famous as Dubliners. Each of the stories is powerful in its own way, these being: The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby, Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House, A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace, and The Dead.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has also long been recognized among world classics of literature, a distinctly Irish novel that speaks to not only aspiring artists and writers but to people in all places and times. Part literary exercise and part fancy and part autobiography, A Portrait is one of the most celebrated books on writers or books for writers, and a rare look inside the young mind of the artist that would go on to write what many have called the greatest novel of the 20th Century in Ulysses.
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. He was the eldest of ten surviving siblings (with two dying of typhoid). Joyce went to study English, French, and Italian at the recently established University College Dublin in 1898, and became involved in the theatre and literary life there. After graduating in 1902, Joyce left for Paris to study medicine, but soon abandoned this (he said due to ill-health); his mother's cancer diagnosis compelled him to return home soon after, and she died in August of that year. He drank heavily and made a small living reviewing books, teaching, and singing tenor (winning the bronze medal in the respected Feis Ceoil in 1904). He first stepped out with Nora Barnacle (a chambermaid from Galway city) on 16 June 1904, and would later commemorate the date in Ulysses (which would also become Joyce's celebration day Bloomsday). Due to his alcoholism and related incidents, the pair spent a number of years living and working in different European cities, and he often worked as a teacher; after 1912, Joyce did not return to Dublin again. His most notable works include Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce died in Zurich just shy of his fifty-ninth birthday in 1941.
