June 16 has been immortalized by lovers of James Joyce's Ulysses everywhere as "Bloomsday" and has become an annual day of pilgrimage and celebration. Ulysses is the epic hour-by-hour account of one day in Dublin -- June 16, 1904. In the novel, the hero, Leopold Bloom -- an ordinary Dubliner -- is a modern-day Odysseus wandering through the urban landscape which is alternately … [Read more...] about Leopold Bloom Lives On
James Joyce
Thomas Flanagan (1923-2003) Earned His Place in Irish Literature
By Seamus Heaney
On March 16, 2002, Thomas Flanagan reviewed a history of St. Patrick's day for The Irish Times and was identified by the paper's literary editor as "a novelist and scholar...currently working on a book about Irish-American writers." When he died in Berkeley from a heart attack five days later, he had submitted to The New York Book Review of Books his piece on William Kennedy … [Read more...] about Thomas Flanagan (1923-2003) Earned His Place in Irish Literature
A Pricey Bundle of Joyce
Also available for viewing for the first time, or at least it was before it was auctioned off, was a previously unknown draft of one of the final chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Eumaeus chapter, described by Joyce critic Hugh Kenner as ‘the book’s most profound tribute to its hero Ulysses,’ has only one other known working draft – the one kept at the State University of … [Read more...] about A Pricey Bundle of Joyce
For the Love of Ireland
Author Susan Cahill tells what prompted her to write For the Love of Ireland: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers. I grew up in New York City in an Irish-American family whose patriarch on my mother's side fought to keep Ulysses out of the Queensborough public libraries and later grand-marshaled the St. Patrick's Day Parade. As a graduate student in David … [Read more...] about For the Love of Ireland
Film Forum: James Joyce in Love
For many years, the conventional wisdom about Nora Barnacle, James Joyce's longtime companion and eventually his wife, was that she was an ignorant but "country cute" peasant from Galway with an unaccountable hold on the great writer, whose work she disdained. How could Joyce have lived all those years with a woman who refused to read Ulysses? Her very name was an excuse for … [Read more...] about Film Forum: James Joyce in Love