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    Ulysses

    Part of Random House 100

    Author James Joyce
    Hardcover (Paper-over-Board, no jacket)
    $32.00 US
    Random House Group | Random House
    12 per carton
    On sale Mar 30, 2027 | 832 Pages | 9798217460069
    Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
    Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

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    Set over the course of a single day—June 16, 1904—and widely considered to be one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century, Joyce’s stylistic masterpiece is integral to Random House’s publishing history.

    In celebration of Random House’s 100th anniversary, the publisher is reissuing this landmark publication as a hardcover edition featuring bold new cover art, a stunning paper-over-board design, and custom endpapers.

    Ulysses was first introduced in the United States in 1918 in excerpts published by the literary magazine the Little Review, but the owners were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity, leading to a trial and the eventual banning of Ulysses in the United States. Due to the ban, the first complete English edition was published in Paris by Shakespeare & Company in 1922. In 1933, Random House engaged in and won a legal battle to overturn the ban and published the first authorized American edition in 1934 on the Modern Library list.

    Set across a single day in Dublin in 1904, Ulysses follows salesman Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and a young intellectual named Stephen Dedalus as they wander the city. A feat of the imagination and largely inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, the story unfolds through stream of consciousness narration and experimental prose styles, making it one of the most important works of modernist literature.
    Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

    --Introibo ad altare Dei.

    Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

    --Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

    Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

    Buck Milligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

    --Back to barracks, he said sternly.

    He added in a preacher's tone:

    --For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all. 

    He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm. 

    --Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?

    He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

    --The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek.
    Copyright © 1990 by James Joyce. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
    “Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua immortalized Rabelais, and The Brothers Karamazov immortalized Dostoyevsky. . . . It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.”—The New York Times

    “To my mind one of the most significant and beautiful books of our time.”—Gilbert Seldes, in The Nation

    “Talk about understanding ‘feminine psychology’—I have never read anything to surpass it, and I doubt if I have ever read anything to equal it.”—Arnold Bennett

    “In the last pages of the book, Joyce soars to such rhapsodies of beauty as have probably never been equaled in English prose fiction.”—Edmund Wilson, in The New Republic
    James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin in 1882. At twenty years old, Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. His writings include Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, Pomes Penyeach, and Finnegans Wake. Ulysses required seven years to complete and Finnegans Wake took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941. View titles by James Joyce

    About

    Set over the course of a single day—June 16, 1904—and widely considered to be one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century, Joyce’s stylistic masterpiece is integral to Random House’s publishing history.

    In celebration of Random House’s 100th anniversary, the publisher is reissuing this landmark publication as a hardcover edition featuring bold new cover art, a stunning paper-over-board design, and custom endpapers.

    Ulysses was first introduced in the United States in 1918 in excerpts published by the literary magazine the Little Review, but the owners were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity, leading to a trial and the eventual banning of Ulysses in the United States. Due to the ban, the first complete English edition was published in Paris by Shakespeare & Company in 1922. In 1933, Random House engaged in and won a legal battle to overturn the ban and published the first authorized American edition in 1934 on the Modern Library list.

    Set across a single day in Dublin in 1904, Ulysses follows salesman Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and a young intellectual named Stephen Dedalus as they wander the city. A feat of the imagination and largely inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, the story unfolds through stream of consciousness narration and experimental prose styles, making it one of the most important works of modernist literature.

    Excerpt

    Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

    --Introibo ad altare Dei.

    Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

    --Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

    Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

    Buck Milligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

    --Back to barracks, he said sternly.

    He added in a preacher's tone:

    --For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all. 

    He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm. 

    --Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?

    He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

    --The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek.
    Copyright © 1990 by James Joyce. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

    Reviews

    “Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua immortalized Rabelais, and The Brothers Karamazov immortalized Dostoyevsky. . . . It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.”—The New York Times

    “To my mind one of the most significant and beautiful books of our time.”—Gilbert Seldes, in The Nation

    “Talk about understanding ‘feminine psychology’—I have never read anything to surpass it, and I doubt if I have ever read anything to equal it.”—Arnold Bennett

    “In the last pages of the book, Joyce soars to such rhapsodies of beauty as have probably never been equaled in English prose fiction.”—Edmund Wilson, in The New Republic

    Author

    James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin in 1882. At twenty years old, Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. His writings include Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, Pomes Penyeach, and Finnegans Wake. Ulysses required seven years to complete and Finnegans Wake took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941. View titles by James Joyce

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