In one hundred short essays David Collard navigates James Joyce’s astonishing cultural legacy in the century since the publication of Ulysses in 1922.
Holding up a funhouse mirror to our times, Collard finds a multitude of Joyces, in often ludicrous disguises, wherever he looks—whether at Ally Sloper, Borsalino hats, Anthony Burgess, Cher, first editions, Flann O’Brien, Guinness, Hattie Jacques, John Cage, Kim Kardashian, Lego, Moby-Dick, numismatics, perfume, pianos, Princess Grace, puns, The Ramones, Sally Rooney, Stanley Unwin, Star Wars, waxworks or Zylo spectacles. Endlessly reinvented and exploited, Joyce emerges as a ubiquitous, indispensable and ruthlessly commodified Everyman.
As Rónán Hession puts it in his foreword, Collard is above all “good company”. Whether you’re a devout admirer or wary newcomer, this surprising, inconventional handbook offers an entertaining prompt to dive into the depths of Joyce’s everexpanding universe with a new awareness that it is very much our own.
David Collard writes for print and online publications including the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, 3:AM Magazine, gorse, Exacting Clam, White Review and others. About a Girl: a Reader’s Guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Halfformed Thing was published by CB editions and he contributed to the recent anthologies We’ll Never Have Paris and Love Bites. He lives in London.