The Dead is considered by many to be Joyce's best short story. It is included in the short story collection, The Dubliners. It is the last in the collection and long, almost novella length. It's very different from Ulysses, very melancholic and introspective in nature.

HOW TO HAVE A LIT AF HOUSE PARTY • make sure at least 1 of your guests arrives sloshed • get someone to play the piano really badly • serve goose • sing a sad song that reminds one of your guests about how the love of her life tragically died • get someone to make a speech with at least two (2) references to mythology. + repetition • bitch about the Pope • discuss your favourite underrated choir singers • do an imitation of a horse ? for some reason ? • question to holiday motives of your gu...

The Dead, James Joyce The Dead, is the final story in the 1914 collection Dubliners, by James Joyce. The other stories in the collection are shorter, "The Dead" is long enough to be described as a novella.The story of a music-loving family on Christmas Eve and at a party. At the party, Gabriel is an educated man, teacher and columnist, the literary columnist of the newspapers. And his handsome woman, Greta, has a special role. The description of the party, from the arrival of the guests, and the...

As with life, there are the small experiences so basic and common to most people that evokes a primal force from deep within. One of them of course is the family get-together, especially at Christmas time, a time where affecting memories are brought to the surface, of loved ones no longer here. Through all the chit-chat, artifices, tensions, jokes, warmth, laughter, and faithful hugs, however brief these moments are, there is a poignant notion stirred by the knowledge that we all come from someb...

snow was general all over IrelandI am in DFW airport on a layover eating an execrable meal from a forgettable restaurant, punch drunk from too much air travel over the past 24 hours and emotionally frayed at having dropped my daughter off with her mother after spending a fabulous week with her in San Francisco. I'm chewing tasteless food while looking into the restaurant with the glassy-eyed, 1000 yard stare of the weary traveler. A family of four takes the table directly in my line of sight; th...

My first James Joyce....Oh my.It's Christmas in Dublin. The snow is falling. The guests have finally all arrived. There is wine, dancing and gossipy conversation. A huge meal is presented, followed by a speech. And then, it's time to go, but.......Someone is singing, you can barely hear him. He sees a woman, his wife, in shadows at the top of the steps listening. He is surprised by her stillness, the mystery of her attitude.The husband recalls memories of their early love, their honeymoon, longi...

Written by James Joyce in 1907 (published in 1914 as part of his Dubliners collection), "The Dead" is a novella about a Christmas early January "Feast of the Epiphany" holiday party in Dublin, Ireland, focusing on the subtler interpersonal communications and relationships between the relatives and others at the party, especially between teacher Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta. It's a melancholy but insightful novella about our disappointments in life and love and how we often don't really see...

Drinking too much can turn you into an emotional hot mess. Being in love can do that to you too.Being in love and drinking...Well you would probably rather wish you were dead.

goddamn is this good. it's those last two pages... you hit those two pages and WHAM! if it doesn't destroy you, then you just ain't human.

“A light of fringe snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his galoshes; and as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.”Such evocative writing, and not just of place, but of something difficult to describe. Our shared world contains what we know and see, but also much that is unseen, such as our memories, our dreams, our imagin...

One more try with James Joyce. This short story is beautifully written. I appreciated more how Joyce draws a place - a party, laughter, songs and music, friends gathered, a well laden table, snow blanketing the streets - than the character portrayals. An accurate snapshot of a time past. Pretty. Nostalgic, but too sentimental for me.

Can a story leave your heart aching like this after just a few short pages?! I’ve just learned that it can indeed. The beautiful, expressive prose delighted me. The nostalgic quality charmed me. The melancholic air indulged my current state of emotion while reading. I don’t know what I was expecting, but James Joyce exceeded whatever I could have possibly been looking for in this little novella. "He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the

James Joyce's The Dead is a deceptively brilliant story! While the dinner party where most of the action takes place isn't always riveting, everything is important. By the waning hours of the evening, you feel the full force of all the details from the party in Gretta Conroy's conversation with her husband, Gabriel. Gretta recounts the story of a former now dead boyfriend whose memory has been evoked by the party. In the space of a few minutes, Gabriel's world is turned upside down as he thinks

The volumes of literary analysis of The Dead proclaim this as the perfect short story ever written. The instructor of a short-story writing workshop I attended recently made the same proclamtion. He admonished our gathering to read this at once and to reread it at least once a year, as an example of writing at its most sublime.Hyperbole? I don't know that it matters. It moved me to tears.I knew nothing of the story, nor have I read Joyce beyond an aborted attempt a dozen years ago at "A Portrait...

i'll probably have the ending of this half-memorized for the rest of my life. shoutout to my 2015 AP lit class for how long we had to talk about the line "falling faintly and faintly falling." like we GET it, snow was general all over ireland! what am i supposed to about it, james!part of a series i'm doing in which i review books i read a long time ago

I can see why this is considered one of the best short stories ever written. I picked it up after reading an interview with Ian McEwan in which he raved about it."The Dead" is one of 15 stories in Joyce's "Dubliners" collection. The main character is Gabriel, who is anxious and insecure, but he also thinks of himself as being smarter than the common man. He attends a party thrown by his elderly aunts, at which he is expected to make a holiday toast, and has several awkward encounters with other

"Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"

I listened to a terrific audio recording, found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQBq8..., alongside my Kindle edition of this and it truly brought the story to life.This novella is the last to feature in Joyce's infamous collection, Dubliners, and is cited as his greatest masterpiece. The story develops during a New Year's Eve party, thrown by the Morkan sisters, where the frivolities and festivities of the night act as a catalyst for one of the attendants to make a shocking revelation to h...

It is just a short story… I’ve started to write my thoughts about it so many times. But it is so perfect, that by the time i reach the second paragraph, i hit the wall. My thoughts stick into each other and become an undistguishable whirlpool of awe. So, you do not need to continue reading what follows; just read the story, and read it now when something is ending but something else is barely beginning just yet… Christmas and New Year, this time..It starts with something very relatable, very tra...

I forgive you for Ulysses James Joyce.  This little novella is masterful.  Joyce takes something we can all relate to, a recurring holiday party, to show how we can be lost in routines that keep us from living life fully and seeing things clearly. He carefully constructs  a memorable scene that conveys lifetimes and connects the present to the past and the living to the dead through memories that show different perspectives. This story is so insightful in a mere 64 pages.    I had to read it twi...