Thursday, June 16, 2011

HAPPY BOOMSDAY!

Today, June 16th, James Joyce fans rejoyce because today is Bloomsday, the day celebrated in Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses, a landmark novel that chronicles an ordinary Dublin day and follows meandering Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and a clever, soul-searching antihero, Stephen Dedalus. To the casual eye, the eye trained for easy entertaining rewards, the book might seem chaotic or formless, a sprawling experiment in stream-of-consciousness, but Joyce modeled the novel on Homer's Odyssey and every event and character in the Greek classic is represented with wit and gravity in the modern day telling. The book ends with one of the highwater marks of English literature, Molly Bloom's beautifully breathless soliloquy--read here by Marcella Riordian.

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