In the Library
Ulysses
James Joyce, 1922
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 19 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 18
- Length
- Length 265k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
yes I said yes I will Yes.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Ulysses
A book with a terrifying reputation that turns out, once you are actually inside it, to be the warmest and funniest company in the language.
The reputation reaches you long before the book does, and it tells you that Ulysses is the hardest novel ever written, that you will need a degree and a concordance and somebody cleverer than you sitting nearby to get through it. That reputation is wrong about almost everything that matters. What it leaves out is that the book is funny, tender, frequently filthy, and built entirely from the most ordinary materials imaginable, which is one day in one city, three people moving through it, a breakfast and a funeral and a walk on the beach and a long way home.
If you like this, try
The Odyssey
Homer
The original that Joyce spent a decade turning inside out.
£1.99
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Woolf does in one slim novel what Joyce does in eight hundred pages: a single day that contains a life.
£1.99
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
Proust matches Joyce's ambition to capture consciousness itself, but chooses memory over a single day.
£1.99
About the book
Everything happens on one ordinary Thursday in Dublin: a man eats a kidney for breakfast, attends a funeral, drifts through pubs and a newspaper office and a maternity hospital, and walks home well after midnight. Joyce poured the whole of a human mind into the passing hours, every flicker of memory and appetite and grief caught as it happens, until the inside of a head becomes the largest place there is. The book changes voice with every chapter, ventriloquizing newspaper headlines, a religious catechism, the entire history of English prose itself, daring you to keep up and rewarding you when you do. And it ends inside Molly Bloom, half-asleep beside her husband, her thoughts running on without a single full stop toward the most famous yes in all of literature. Few books have loved one human life this completely. Give it the patience it asks for, and a single Dublin day opens into the whole of being alive.