DUBLINERS - Penguin Modern Classics

Thus Joyce wrote to his brother, and at the early age of twenty-five he completed Dubliners -a sequence of highly detailed episodes depicting middle-class Catholic life in Dublin. The mystery of sexual awakening are related in the opening stories with clarity and sensitivity. In the most famous story, 'The Dead', Joyce presents a Christmas gathering of friends and neighbors, but there is an underlying tension and sense of despair involved in the plot, which adds a disturbing element to the superficial social sense. The realism and symbolic imagery of Dubliners created a starling new form of writing, which is as impressive today as when it first appeared in 1914.