Introducing Joyce

James Joyce ranks alongside such figures as Picasso, Schoenberg and Stravinsky as one of the great pioneers of modernism. But a myth of Joyce's "difficulty" has taken root, discouraging many readers from approaching his work. This is a great pity, because his writings are deeply human, enormously comic, and compelling reading. Although Joyce spent much of his life in self-imposed exile, all of his writings are obsessively and microscopically focused on Dublin's fair city. David Norris, Irish Senator, writer and Trinity College don, provides an introductory map to the labyrinth of Joyce's visionary Dublin. He takes us step by step from the early stories "Dubliners", and "A portrait of the artist as a young man", into the sprawling comic universe of "Ulysses", and finally to the mythic dreamworld of "Finnegans Wake".