Dubliners
James Joyce

Dubliners are a collection of 15 short tales by James Joyce, a modernist Irish writer, about everyday incidents in Dublin's largely lower-middle class existence. The stories trace the routines, wants, deficiencies, and fantasies of the city's people as they pass through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and public life. 'My purpose was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country, and I chose Dublin as the setting because it seemed to me to be the centre of paralysis,' Joyce wrote.

These are stories of large and tiny frustrations, of illusions abandoned, of deep loneliness, of shattered marriages, of lives of 'commonplace sacrifices ending in final insanity,' as critic Katherine Mullin put it. Destitute frauds, failing artists, shy spinsters, bullied shop girls, misanthropic celibates, and belligerent, lonely drunks populate them. These are tales of desperate lives living on the fringes, lives Joyce was familiar with.' A must-read public life narrative