With an essay by J. I. M. Stewart.
'Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word
paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears ... But now it sounded to me
like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed
to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work'
From a child
grappling with the death of a fallen priest, to a young woman's dilemma over whether to
elope to Argentina with her lover, to the dance party at which a man discovers just how
little he really knows about his wife, these fifteen stories bring the gritty realism of
existence in Joyce's native Dublin to life. With Dubliners, James Joyce reinvented
the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once
blasphemous and sacramental.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the
eighteenth century and the first novels to the beginning of the First World War.
