Ulysses

James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, best remembered for his short-story collection, Dubliners, and his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake. Ulysses is one of the cornerstones of English literature. It deals with the stories of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s earlier semiautobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Leopold Bloom. Dedalus and Bloom go about their separate business, meeting a gallery of memorable Dubliners. Joyce includes every detail from their day-to-day lives and takes readers into their thoughts, emotions and memories. Through the events of one day, Joyce paints a picture bright enough to detail the experience of being a human, and defines the standards of realism in literature once and for all.