Dubliners

Dubliners was completed in '05, but British & Irish publishers & printers found it so offensive & immoral it was suppressed. It finally came out in London in '14, just as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in the journal Egoist under Ezra Pound's auspices. The 1st three stories might be incidents from a draft of Portrait of the Artist & many of the characters who figure in Ulysses 1st appear here, but this isn't a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life & mature work. It's one of the great story collections in the English language--a brilliant, unflinching, often tragic portrait of early 20th-century Dublin. The book, which begins & ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" thru tales of public life. Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland.
Sisters
Encounter
Araby
Eveline
After the race
Two Gallants
Boarding house
Little cloud
Counterparts
Clay
Painful case
Ivy day in the committee room
Mother
Grace
Dead