The Portable James Joyce

Not for one who does not want to invest some time in the history and culture of Ireland from which Joyce draws inspiration.

This book was brilliant! I love books with multiple short stories and such in them and the hardcover was so nice to have because it helped me not ruin the book. I am so clumsy books come to me to die, but they have a nice life because I read them to death

One of the best books in my library! Mostly for the stories from The Dubliners and A portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

A handy little book. I would have preferred a couple more sections from the Wake, but that might be pushing it.

This is a good compilation but the completeness comes at a price....very small print and bulky book....fine for quick reference and short periods of reading

Great collection from a great author... nuff said

great book~

This "portable" James Joyce is actually a bit of a handful. It is over 700 pages of select Joyce works, made to give a taste of this very popular Irish author. Detailed inside are selections from his short stories of The Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the play Exiles, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, and selected poems.Joyce's work helped to springboard more modern literature where snippets of every day human life was the focus of the plot as opposed to some monstrous upheaval that sends main characters into a tizzy. The drama, Joyce would most likely argue if he was still with us, is in the every day. That concept carried on well after Joyce's death and the end of his career into modern literature of today. He also opened the door for stream of consciousness writing within fictional characters to help supplant raw emotions in his work, as seen in Ulysses.The selected works are pretty conclusive, but I, personally, could have done without so much of Finnegan's Wake. If you're looking for just a snippet of Joyce, the rest would have done nicely, but Finnegan's Wake is simply too much work for the layman's reader. Written in brogue and in a series of ramblings, it is nigh on impossible to discern what is happening without careful detail and a slow deconstruction of the work. At which point, if that's your goal, you might as well just buy the whole of Finnegan's Wake instead of only just a section in this collection. All of his other works are easier to read and more apt to tickle the curious mind.By no means an easy book to tote around, but definitely one for the shelves if you're curious about Irish nationalism as detailed through a careful examination of the every day, stream of consciousness writing, and of course the drama of a simple human life.