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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780586091494
ISBN: 0586091491
Label: HarperCollins Publishers
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Publishers
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 944
Publication Date: 1996-08
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Studio: HarperCollins Publishers

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Related Items:

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)
• Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses [Revised and Expanded Edition]
• Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics)
• The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses
• see more

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.com Review:
Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus

Product Description:
James Joyce adapted the structure of one of history's oldest and most familiar stories to his tale of Leopold Bloom's one-day odyssey through Dublin to produce a landmark in 20th-century literature. Evoking in rich, sensory details the streets, pubs, brothels, and shops of Dublin, focusing on seemingly insignificant detail, "Ulysses" is a triumphant celebration of an ordinary man. 4 cassettes.




Rating: - In History's Context
This is one of those novels that in actuality heralded the end of the novel as it was known (and still is for those of us who still enjoy a story for story's sake, and by that I mean all the ingredients).

I first attempted to read this during my days in the army since I'd heard so much about it. But it wasn't until college that I was able to read this book and make sense of it (spent a whole semester doing so in a course by a superb professor).

But let's get back to the ... Read More

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Rating: - Amazon Recommends I: James Joyce's Ulysses
Hello from this particular corner of the abstract retail market.

What a delight to have Amazon recommend the novel I've made practically a point in life to get around to reading! It provided just the necessary final incentive needed to throw all the "wait 'til a good time" aside and actually just read it, which of course is ultimately how it needs to be read.

"Ulysses" is famous for being "impenetrable" and "unreadable", but is far from either. Just like other formal experiments ... Read More

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Rating: - Warning " look inside book" option is out of date
Ulysses (Everyman's Library, 100) When I ordered this book,(oct 08) the "look inside book" option showed the copy with blue covers, title on cover. But I received one with red covers, title on spine,the dust jackets are identical. Other reviews praise the blue covered volume, now out of date. If this matters to you, now you know you will receive the red covered volume.With my return, amazon may update the "look inside" book to show current red covers so you get what you ordered.

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Rating: - Ten Reasons to Re-read Ulysses
1. When you tried it in college, it was a task, a challenge, an intellectual mountain to climb, a test of your literary mettle. Perhaps if you read it apart from any course, as I did, you felt you failed.

2. In the intervening time you've read perhaps hundreds of Modernist and post-modernist novels by Joyce's acknowledged progeny, those whose numbers are legion: from William Faulkner to Beckett to Barth to Perec to Eggers to Coover to Calvino to Kundera, from "Wittgenstein's Mistress" to "Wittgenstein's ... Read More

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Rating: - Mount Everest for Readers
I can offer little in the way of literary criticism that has not been expounded by scholars about Joyce's masterpiece. What I can offer is the viewpoint of an 'average' reader.

My edition was the 1922 text, and it was prefaced by the original publisher with a simple disclaimer: "The publisher asks the reader's indulgence for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances." And it certainly is understandable and necessary: the text is rife with punctuation, spelling and word issues - but it ... Read More

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