Mini Modern Classics Two Gallants - Softcover

Joyce, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141196025 ISBN 13: 9780141196022

Publisher: Penguin Classic, 2011

Synopsis

'Little jets of wheezing laughter followed one another out of his convulsed body. His eyes, twinkling with cunning enjoyment, glanced at every moment towards his companion's face.' 'When he was quite sure that the narrative had ended he laughed noiselessly for fully half a minute. Then he said: - Well...! That takes the biscuit!' James Joyce's naturalistic, unflinching portrayal of ordinary working people in his Dubliners stories was a literary landmark. These four stories from that collection offer glimpses of defeated lives - an unremarkable death, a theft, a desperate plan, a failed writer's dream - yet each creates a compelling and ultimately redemptive vision of a city and of human experience. This book includes Two Gallants, The Sisters, The Boarding House and A Little Cloud.

About this title

About the Author

James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. The oldest of ten children, he grew up in a family that went from prosperity to penury because of his father’s wastrel behavior. After receiving a rigorous Jesuit education, twenty-year-old Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin in 1902 to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. On one trip back to Ireland, he fell in love with the now famous Nora Barnacle on June 16, the day he later chose as “Bloomsday” in his novel Ulysses. Nora was an uneducated Galway girl who became his lifelong companion and the mother of his two children. In debt and drinking heavily, Joyce lived for 36 years on the Continent, supporting himself first by teaching jobs, then through the patronage of Mrs. Harold McCormick (Edith Rockerfeller) and the English feminist and editor Harriet Shaw Weaver. His writings include Chamber Music (1907), Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Exiles (1918), Ulysses (1922), Pomes Penyeach (1927), Finnegan's Wake (1939), and an early draft of A Portrait of a Young Man, Stephan Hero (1944). Ulysses required seven years to complete, and his masterpiece, Finnegan's Wake, took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classic
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0141196025
• ISBN 13: 9780141196022
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 112