The Harvard Square Book Circle

The Harvard Square Book Circle, our in-store book club, will discuss James Joyce's Dubliners.

With the fifteen stories in Dubliners, James Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest ("The Sisters"), the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of "Two Gallants," or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife ("The Dead"), Joyce takes narrative places it had never been before. 

“It is in the prose of Dubliners that we first hear the authentic rhythms of Joyce the poet. . . . Dubliners is, in a very real sense, the foundation of Joyce’s art. In shaping its stories, he developed that mastery of naturalistic detail and symbolic design which is the hallmark of his mature fiction.” —Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, authors of Dubliners: Text and Criticism