a book

Ulysses

Name: Ulysses
Rating: 5 (12 reviews)
Author: James Joyce
ISBN: 9781505297546

James Joyce · 1990 · 412 pages

Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach in February 1922, in Paris. It is considered to be 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." However, even proponents of Ulysses such as Anthony Burgess have described the book as "inimitable, and also possibly mad." 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 Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the poem.

recommended by 12 people

sourced from public statements

Salman Rushdie
“Here I am reading a bit of Ulysses, along with others reading other bits, to celebrate this centennial year of the great book.”↗
Debbie Millman
“I also really love a line from Ulysses, which is 'The longest way around is the shortest way home.'”↗
Irvine Welsh
“Read this book in every one of my adult decades and got something different from it each time. “Ulysses” isn’t a novel, it’s a life project, and like life itself, we embark upon it striving towards understanding it.”↗
Pete Buttigieg
“The greatest work of modern English literature. It’s known for being complex and difficult, but in a way it’s very democratic: a story about what it is to be human as one middle-class guy goes about one day of his life in Dublin.”↗
Gabriel García Márquez
“[Ulysses] not only was the discovery of a genuine world that I never suspected inside me, but it also provided invaluable technical help to me in freeing language and in handling time and structures in my books.”↗
Jennifer Connelly
“I would say I understand maybe three of the zillions of allusions in this book. Still, I find it such a remarkable thing. Ulysses is an epic that loosely follows The Odyssey, but it’s populated by modern people with all their foibles and misdemeanors. It’s so intricate—and as I said, so much of it is over my head—but I love the way Joyce talks about the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible.’ You shut your eyes, open them again, and find the world continues without your witnessing it. It’s a beautiful reflection on change and time and one’s place in the scheme of things.”↗
Martin Amis
“It contains everything, nothing new has really been written since.”↗
Christopher Hitchens
Neil Strauss
Ernest Hemingway
Charles Fernyhough
Robert McCrum