Recommendations
Books Like Dubliners
Best books to read after Dubliners by James Joyce
Joyce's 1914 masterwork — fifteen stories of Dublin life, each built toward an epiphany, ending with 'The Dead' — is the finest short story collection in English and one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. These recommendations extend the experience through Joyce's other major works, through the tradition of the literary short story that Dubliners helped establish, and through fiction that shares its commitment to the interior life and the ordinary moment as the site of revelation.
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
The essential next Joyce — Stephen Dedalus's formation from childhood through his rejection of Catholicism and Ireland at the age of twenty. A Portrait of the Artist is the novel-length development of the Bildungsroman material that Dubliners treats in miniature (particularly 'Araby' and the stories of childhood and adolescence), and the young Stephen Dedalus who appears at the end of A Portrait is the same character who appears as a young man in Ulysses.
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Ulysses
by James Joyce
The masterwork toward which Dubliners is the threshold — Leopold Bloom's day in Dublin on 16 June 1904, in eighteen chapters each in a different style. Dubliners is the best preparation for Ulysses: it establishes the Dublin world, the technique of rendering consciousness, and the method of the epiphany that Ulysses develops into a twenty-four-hour structure of extraordinary formal ambition.
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Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
The American parallel — Anderson's 1919 interconnected stories of a small Ohio town organized around the 'grotesques' (people deformed by the adoption of a single truth) who inhabit it. Anderson read Dubliners and was directly influenced by Joyce's method; Winesburg, Ohio then directly influenced Hemingway and Faulkner, making it the American linchpin of the short story tradition that Dubliners established.
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In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway
The most direct American inheritor of Dubliners' method — Hemingway's 1925 collection of stories and vignettes in which meaning is conveyed through what is omitted rather than what is stated. 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,' 'Hills Like White Elephants,' and 'Big Two-Hearted River' all use the Joycean technique of the iceberg: the visible surface that implies the invisible depth.
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The Complete Short Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
The American Catholic companion — O'Connor's stories of the American South are organized around the same violent epiphanic moment that Dubliners employs, but O'Connor's moments of grace are more grotesque and more theologically explicit: the peacock, the bull, the grandmother's recognition in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find.' Both Joyce and O'Connor use the shock of sudden revelation to crack open ordinary life.
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Selected Stories
by Anton Chekhov
The dominant precursor that Joyce most admired — Chekhov's stories, which Joyce read with intense admiration, established the principle that became central to Dubliners: that a story can be organized around a moment of recognition rather than a conventional plot, and that the most important things in a story are what is not said. 'A Painful Case' and 'Clay' are among the most Chekhovian stories Joyce wrote.
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Nine Stories
by J.D. Salinger
Salinger's 1953 companion in the tradition of the literary short story organized around the epiphanic moment — 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' 'For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,' 'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.' Salinger shares Joyce's interest in the consciousness of the young and his resistance to the conventional story arc, and Nine Stories is the most Joycean American collection of its decade.
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Collected Stories
by Grace Paley
The feminist urban parallel — Paley's stories of New York City women (Faith Darwin and her circle) are in the tradition of Dubliners' social realism and its commitment to the ordinary life as the subject of serious fiction, but set in 1960s-70s New York and told in a voice that is funnier, more politically engaged, and more openly feminist. Paley is the most important American woman working in the Joycean tradition of the urban short story.
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