'Dubliners' turns 100 …

… The Smart Set: Old People, Young People, and Priests - May 30, 2014. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“I call the series Dubliners,” wrote James Joyce, “to betray the soul of that... paralysis which many consider a city.” Dubliners, he argued in a letter to a publisher who eventually declined to take on the manuscript, was written for the benefit of Irish civilization, for in his stories, wrote James, the Irish people would get “one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.” In the looking glass, Dubliners would see a people frozen in time. They would see themselves existing in the grey zone between paralysis and freedom.