March 2012 Guest Editor Alan Bradley on Louise Penny...
As a young child and early reader, I used to pilfer my older sister’s copy of Ulysses. I didn’t understand the book but I loved the words. More than sixty years later, there are parts of Joyce (notably Finnegans Wake) that I still don’t understand, but I still love the words. I keep both books on my night table.
Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety in February 1922, in Paris. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature, and has been called a demonstration and summation of the entire movement. According to Declan Kiberd, Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking.