Fifteen stories of Dublin life at the turn of the twentieth century, published by Grant Richards in June 1914 after nearly a decade of wrangling with printers and publishers who found the book too frank about the city it named. Joyce ordered the stories to run in a single arc — childhood, adolescence, maturity, then public life — closing with "The Dead", the long final story widely counted among the finest ever written in English.
A boy keeps vigil over the body of a paralysed priest. A young woman weighs an escape to Buenos Aires against a promise made to her dying mother. A copying clerk, humiliated at his desk, drinks away his wages and takes it out on his son. A man learns four years too late what his refusal cost the woman who once reached for his hand. And at his aunts' Christmas party, Gabriel Conroy discovers that his wife has carried the memory of a boy in Galway all through their marriage.
Writing to his publisher in 1906, Joyce said he had chosen Dublin "because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis", and that he had written the book "in a style of scrupulous meanness". That is the method: plain, unsparing sentences that withhold the consolations a reader expects, and stories that end not in resolution but in epiphany — a flash of self-knowledge that changes nothing.