Dubliners by James Joyce

A young boy falls in love with his friend’s much older sister and is desperate to get her the perfect gift from the Araby Fair.

After a party, a man discovers something he had never known about his wife, which has a devastating impact on their marriage.

An ambitious mother schemes to get her daughter a role in a series of concerts.

A drunken legal clerk takes out his frustrations on his helpless young son.

These and other brilliant stories are contained in the collection entitled Dubliners. Published in 1914 during the height of the Irish Nationalist Movement, the fifteen stories are an invaluable record of the life and times of the middle class in Dublin. The strangest aspect of this book, which we value so much today, is that it was serially rejected by fifteen publishers before a Dublin publisher agreed to do so. Many publishers wanted certain passages to be cut, while others did not agree with the ending of some of the stories and wanted them rewritten. One of them even burned the original manuscript when James Joyce the author refused to pay for publication. He managed to salvage parts of it and rewrote it with great difficulty. He continued to doggedly pursue his conviction and the result is available today for all of us to marvel at.

Most of the stories here are based on Joyce’s personal philosophy that there is an epiphany or a turning point in each of our lives that creates that moment of decision. His style is very simple and he rarely allows his own voice to intrude into the story. He seldom passes moral judgments on his characters and allows readers to form their own conclusions. The tales are best read in sequence, as the characters progress in age from childhood to old age.

A wonderfully evocative collection from a master craftsman who redefined the nature of the English novel!

Listen and follow

Information for podcasters

• Podcast GUID: 843fb17a-9d3c-575c-b153-a1cdb4cdf039
• This podcast doesn’t have a trailer. Apple Podcasts has a specific episode type for a trailer, which also gets used by many other podcast apps: but there isn’t one correctly marked in the RSS feed from the host.
• The audio of this podcast has an HTTP address, and not HTTPS. If it isn’t also available as HTTPS, it is no longer playable in any embedded player on an HTTPS site in Google Chrome.
• This podcast’s RSS feed is not secure. Apple may require this in future.
• This podcast appears to be missing from Amazon Music, Spotify, and iVoox. We list all the podcast directories to be in.
• See all episodes
• See this podcast’s listener numbers, contact details and more at Rephonic
• Validate this podcast’s RSS feed with Livewire, Truefans or CastFeedValidator

Privacy: The player will download audio directly from the host if you listen. That shares data (like your IP address or details of your device) with them.
Affiliate links: This page links to Apple Podcasts. We may receive a commission for purchases made via those links.
Cache: This podcast page made Jul 21, 8:22pm UTC. Scheduled for update on Aug 20. Rebuild this page now