Poets & Writers Theater

“The more you know about the book, the better the book becomes,” says author Colm Tóibín about James Joyce’s iconic novel Ulysses in this Morgan Library & Museum video introducing their exhibition “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” which showcases printed books, manuscripts, letters, handwritten notes, and photographs from Joyce’s life and career.

In this animated TED-Ed lesson, Sam Slote, an associate professor at Trinity College Dublin and the author of Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), explains what makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a literary masterpiece and why Joyce, himself, once said: “If Ulysses isn’t worth reading, then life isn’t worth living.”

The debut novelist speaks about how reading James Joyce’s Ulysses influenced her to write a book in six months, and how she struggled for years to get it published. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing was published by Coffee House Press in September.

To mark the centennial anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's Dubliners, author Victor LaValle explains how Joyce's stories about the ordinary people of Dublin influenced his own writing of the underrepresented voices in his Queens neighborhood.

For lovers of Irish literature, and the work of James Joyce in particular, June 16 is a special day. Bloomsday is a celebration of the life of the Irish author on the day in which the events of his novel Ulysses (which stars Leopold Bloom, hence the name) is set. To commemorate the thirtieth annual observance, we present Adam Harvey's performance of pages 193 to 195 of Finnegans Wake.