Two Gallants

Two Gallants

Summary

'Little jets of wheezing laughter followed one another out of his convulsed body. His eyes, twinkling with cunning enjoyment, glanced at every moment towards his companion's face.'

'When he was quite sure that the narrative had ended he laughed noiselessly for fully half a minute. Then he said:
- Well...! That takes the biscuit!'

James Joyce's naturalistic, unflinching portrayal of ordinary working people in his Dubliners stories was a literary landmark. These four stories from that collection offer glimpses of defeated lives - an unremarkable death, a theft, a desperate plan, a failed writer's dream - yet each creates a compelling and ultimately redemptive vision of a city and of human experience.


This book includes Two Gallants, The Sisters, The Boarding House and A Little Cloud.

About the author

James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. He was none the less educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at University College, Dublin, and displayed considerable academic and literary ability. Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional universe is firmly rooted in his native Dublin, the city which provides the settings and much of the subject matter for all his fiction. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). James Joyce died in Zürich, on 13 January 1941.
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