June 16, 1904. Leopold Bloom walks through Dublin — to work, to a funeral, to a pub, to a beach, toward home — and in doing so becomes one of the most fully realized characters in the history of the novel.
James Joyce's Ulysses maps a single ordinary day onto the structure of Homer's Odyssey, following Bloom, his wife Molly, and the young writer Stephen Dedalus through a Dublin rendered in language that shifts, fractures, and reinvents itself chapter by chapter. Difficult, funny, obscene, and tender by turns, it remains the novel every serious reader eventually has to reckon with — the book that changed what fiction was allowed to do.
A landmark of modernist literature, still argued over more than a century later.
Widely regarded as the most influential novel of the 20th centuryA single day in Dublin mapped onto Homer's OdysseyMolly Bloom's closing soliloquy remains one of literature's most famous passages
One day. One city. Every question fiction has ever asked.
