Finnegans Wake

As he was finishing Finnegans Wake, Joyce proclaimed, “I have discovered I can do anything with language I want.” Indeed, with his last book, which took him seventeen years to write, Joyce takes literary modernism to new territories by harvesting from as many as eighty different languages to create a wordscape that is both precise and impressionistic, a work that is intellectual, avant-garde, but also sad, funny, earthy and brimming with humanity. This edition includes an introduction by Dr Sam Slote of Trinity College Dublin.

Reading Finnegans Wake offers a pleasure that derives from its curious mixture of lyricism, humour, and the sense it offers of decoding a diabolic conundrum.

Born in Dublin, James Joyce (1882–1941) spent most of his life abroad, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. His writings, however, mainly centre on Dublin – most famously Ulysses, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He pioneered and perfected avant-garde prose techniques that saw him rise to the rank of one of Europe’s foremost Modernists.