This group of fifteen brief narratives connected by a place and a time, the city of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century, was written when James Joyce was a precocious young graduate of University College. With great subtlety and artistic restraint, Joyce suggests what lies beneath the pieties of Dublin society and its surface drive for respectability, suggesting the difficulties and despairs that were being endured on a daily basis in homes, pubs, streets, and offices of the city: underemployment, domestic violence, alcoholism, poverty, hunger, emotional and sexual repression. No writer ever took more seriously the details, history, and culture of a particular place than Joyce did with his home city, and these stories combine dark humor with compassion and a searching eye for the causes of suffering.

This new edition's historical appendices include contemporary reviews (including one by Ezra Pound) and materials on religion, the struggle for Irish independence, and Dublin's musical and performance culture.