An advertising canvasser eats a kidney for breakfast, attends a funeral, wanders through Dublin, and in the course of one ordinary day in June 1904 becomes the vessel for every mode of human consciousness that language can hold. James Joyce spent seven years building this novel, and it arrived in 1922 as the most ambitious reconstruction of what a book could be since the invention of print. Each of its eighteen episodes reinvents its own style, from newspaper headlines to fugal counterpoint to the unpunctuated riverflow of Molly Bloom's final yes. Beneath the virtuosity lies the ancient pattern of the Odyssey, compressed into one city, one day, and the radical claim that the heroic is not the extraordinary but the ordinary, fully seen.