“From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.”

Ulysses is one of the finest examples of modernist literature ever published, exploring a single uneventful day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an ordinary salesman who lives in Dublin, and also features his wife Molly, and a writer, Stephen Dedalus. Heavy structural and thematic parallels are drawn between Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey, and Joyce makes heavy use of stream of consciousness to portray the characters’ psyches in greater detail, making it a difficult but extremely rewarding read.

James Joyce was an Irish writer, poet, and literary critic considered to be one of the most important authors of the 20th century for his unique modernist style of writing. His most well-known books include Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegan’s Wake, and he was an influence on writers as varied as Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, and Jorge Luis Borges.