Recommendations
Books Like Ulysses
Best books to read after Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses is the novel that dared to be as complex as consciousness itself — 18 episodes, 18 styles, one ordinary Dublin day. If Joyce's ambition and his trust in the reader moved you, these books share his commitment to form as meaning, his interior richness, and his conviction that the ordinary day is the proper subject of serious literature.
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
The essential prequel to Ulysses — Stephen Dedalus's Catholic Irish childhood, education, and artistic awakening; understanding where Stephen has come from (the religion he has rejected, the Irish nationalist politics he has distanced himself from) makes his position in Ulysses comprehensible, and Portrait is far more accessible, making it the ideal starting point for readers approaching Joyce
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Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's novel of a single day in London is the closest British contemporary equivalent to Ulysses in its project — both published in 1922–25, both organized around a single day in a great modern city, both using stream of consciousness to map the inner life of characters who are simultaneously perfectly ordinary and extraordinarily interior; Woolf and Joyce were the two great inventors of the stream-of-consciousness novel and reading both reveals how differently two minds can solve the same formal problem
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To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's masterpiece of modernist interior consciousness — the most formally accomplished British parallel to Ulysses in its commitment to rendering time, memory, and perception through a prose style that enacts rather than describes consciousness; where Ulysses is encyclopedic and comic, To the Lighthouse is lyrical and elegiac, but both are committed to formal experimentation as the only way to tell the truth about inner experience
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The Waves
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's most experimental novel — the furthest British modernism went in the direction of interior monologue, closer to Ulysses' late chapters (Oxen of the Sun, Circe) in its willingness to let the formal experiment become the content; recommended for readers who want to continue in the direction of maximum modernist formal ambition after finishing Joyce
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The Recognitions
by William Gaddis
Gaddis's 956-page novel about forgery, art, and authenticity in mid-20th-century New York and Europe — the most ambitious American heir to Ulysses: similarly demanding, similarly allusive, similarly committed to the idea that the difficulty of the work is inseparable from its meaning, and similarly vast in its ambition to represent an entire civilization through its artifice
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Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
Wallace's 1996 novel — 1,079 pages about addiction, entertainment, and the culture of distraction in an America that has commodified all experience — is the most visible American heir to Ulysses in popular literary culture: both are formally maximalist, both demand active reader participation, both are simultaneously a portrait of a culture and an argument about what serious fiction must look like to tell the truth about that culture
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Dubliners
by James Joyce
Joyce's short story collection — fifteen stories about life in Dublin, the most accessible of his major works; essential for understanding Joyce's Dublin, his prose technique, and his vision of Irish paralysis; recommended for readers who found Ulysses difficult and want to approach Joyce more gradually, or for readers who loved Ulysses and want more Joyce
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The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Faulkner read Ulysses and acknowledged its influence on his development of stream-of-consciousness and multiple-narrator techniques in The Sound and the Fury; the comparison reveals both the common modernist project — telling a story through fragmented consciousness rather than linear narration — and the profound difference in texture between Joyce's Irish urban comedy and Faulkner's Southern Gothic tragedy
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