Giacomo Joyce - James Joyce

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.

This heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love?

The manuscript of 'Giacomo Joyce', written in James Joyce's best handwriting and folded between the covers of a school notebook, was discovered in Trieste. Most likely written in 1914, some of it served as a rehearsal for passages in Ulysses. Had Joyce meant to pillage it or publish it? Either way, this fragmented evocation of unrequited desire is, in the words of Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann, a work of 'small, fragile, enduring perfection'.

With a new introduction by Colm Tibn.

Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

James Joyce was born in Rathgar, Dublin, in 1882. In 1904 he and Nora Barnacle (whom he married in 1931) left Ireland for Trieste. Abroad, free from the restrictions he felt in Ireland, Joyce felt compelled to write of his native land, producing Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (1916). During World War I, he lived in Zurich from 1915 to 1919, and in 1920 moved to Paris, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Towards the end of December 1939 James Joyce and Nora Barnacle left Paris for a small village near Vichy and ultimately settled in Zurich, where he died in January 1941. His major works, pioneering the 'stream of consciousness' style, are the novels Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

This poetic fragment-epiphanies of mood, a fusion of images, observations, and abstract implications-celebrates a moment of romantic grace in the life of the writer while he was living and teaching in Trieste during the years preceding the First World War. It is, in the new expressive linguistic form he was to perfect in Ulysses, his ironic evocation of the attraction he felt toward a young lady student of his-an attraction just as definitely rejected by the lady in question.
New York Review of Books