Bloomsday, James Joyce's Ulysses celebration
Communities in Dublin and around the world mark Bloomsday on June 16 with readings, guided walks, pub performances and theatrical tributes to James Joyce's Ulysses. Ulysses chronicles a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he moves through Dublin on June 16, 1904, and many events recreate chapters or stage public readings of key episodes. Nora Barnacle first met James Joyce on June 10, 1904, and their second meeting on June 16 inspired Joyce to set the novel on that date. Bloomsday matters because Ulysses reshaped modernist fiction and the festivities turn a famously challenging text into a public way to experience Dublin's history and language.
It's Bloomsday, the day on which the events of James Joyce's Ulysses take place, 16 June 1904. My dad's copy of Ulysses, which I took with me when I left home in 1980. It remains for me the greatest novel written in the English language.
Simon Knott82/3 A plaque on the former Shakespeare & Company bookshop, 12 Rue de l'Odéon, Paris. Ulysses was published here on Joyce's birthday in 1922. Sylvia Beach was an American so the shop remained open at the start of WWII, but closed after the USA entered the war, and did not reopen.
piers-allan.bsky.social3I must have a 5th go at trying to finish it.
