Melville House Books

James Joyce

• Central Bank of Ireland misquotes Ulysses on commemorative coin

  “I fear those big words,” says Stephen Daedalus, early in Ulysses, “that make us so unhappy.” Stephen, of course, isn’t referring to words like “onomatopoeia” or “honorificabilitudinitatibus,” but to words with… Read more »

• Finnegans Wake: Huge in China

  Imagine the consternation translator Dai Congrong felt when she came across the following passage in James Joyce’s notoriously baffling Finnegans Wake: “What clashes here of wills gen wont, oystrygods gaggin… Read more »

• James Joyce: cat lover and children’s book author

  A newly discovered children’s book by James Joyce called The Cats of Copenhagen has been recently published by Scribner in the United States. Anastasia Herbert of Ithys Press, who first… Read more »

• The villanelle makes a comeback

  A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. Five tercets are followed by a quatrain.  This highly structured and rigid form is only about a… Read more »

• In defense of Stephen Joyce

  In an essay at the Smart Set, Jessa Crispin defends James Joyce’s hated literary executor, grandson Stephen Joyce, who has for years complicated scholarly access to papers and permissions to… Read more »

• Literary epiphanies while running

  After our first long training run this weekend in preparation for the New York City Marathon, the leader of my running group called everyone together to make a few announcements.… 2 / Read more »

• FRIDAY SOMETHING-OR-OTHER-TO-DO-WITH-BOOKS MUSIC VIDEO: “The Croppy Boy”

  Tomorrow is Bloomsday, the day when James Joyce enthusiasts across the globe gather to celebrate the events comprising Ulysses, the author’s masterpiece. With this in mind, it seems fitting this week… Read more »

• The Sound and the Fury, hold the fury

  In an essay in this week’s New Yorker titled “Easy Writers,” Arthur Krystal traces the history of guilty reading pleasures and finds the modernist novel responsible for drawing a hard… 1 / Read more »

• Scholars and publishers celebrate the end of the James Joyce estate

  The day that many scholars, publishers, critics, and other lovers of literature have hoped would come at last, has come at last. Yes, as of the 1st of January, the… 2 / Read more »

• Twitter, meet Leopold Bloom

  How do you take a 265,000-word novel and condense it into manageably sized, 140-character chunks? That’s the question one man seeks to answer this Thursday, June 16th, or Bloomsday, the… 1 / Read more »