Dubliners
Ordinary lives awaken
StorylineChildren, lovers, workers and families move through Joyce’s Dublin, carrying private hopes into ordinary streets and rooms. Across fifteen stories, brief moments of recognition reveal the distance between the lives people lead and the lives they imagine.
“Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.”
THE SHORT SHOT EDITION
The whole city fits inside a private moment.
Read one story at a time, or follow the collection’s widening view of a city and its people.
- EditionMulti-story collection
- Estimated reading time271–338 minutesWhole collection · stories only
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At a glance
- Work
- Multi-story collection
- Author
- James Joyce
- Original language
- English
Stories in this collection
15 stories
- The SistersA boy tries to understand the death of a priest and the unsettling fragments adults leave unexplained.
- An EncounterTwo schoolboys escape the classroom in search of adventure and meet a disturbing stranger.
- ArabyA boy invests a trip to a bazaar with the promise of romance and a larger world.
- EvelineA young woman weighs the possibility of escape against the claims of home, duty and memory.
- After the RaceA young Dubliner joins wealthy international companions for an exhilarating evening of money and display.
- Two GallantsTwo men’s talk of romance reveals a harsher economy of favors, manipulation and need.
- The Boarding HouseA landlady considers how to turn a relationship under her roof into a respectable arrangement.
- A Little CloudA reunion with a successful friend leaves a clerk measuring his domestic life against his literary ambitions.
- CounterpartsA humiliated office worker carries his frustration through an evening of drinking and back into his home.
- ClayA quiet woman’s Halloween visit exposes the small rituals and silences surrounding her place in other people’s lives.
- A Painful CaseA solitary man’s brief friendship returns to trouble the order he has made of his life.
- Ivy Day in the Committee RoomElection workers talk politics, loyalty and disappointment while waiting for the day to pass.
- A MotherA determined mother’s efforts to protect her daughter’s musical engagement collide with unreliable organizers.
- GraceFriends propose a spiritual fresh start for a man whose drinking has brought him to an embarrassing fall.
- The DeadA winter party brings Gabriel Conroy face to face with the private depths of a familiar life.
Read the opening
There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.
THE EDITOR’S TAKE
Fifteen stories. A city seen from within.
Why “Dubliners”?
- Ordinary encounters open into startling moments of self-recognition.
- The city emerges through many voices, ages and kinds of disappointment.
- The fifteen-story sequence rewards both dipping in and reading straight through.
A question to savor
Which moment of recognition in these stories feels most like something you have avoided knowing?
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