James Joyce Books in Order

Joyce’s first book gathers thirty-six brief love poems shaped by song, longing, nature, and changing moods. The poems are more traditional in form than his later fiction, but they already show his care for sound and rhythm.

A Dublin boy becomes consumed by a romantic crush and promises to bring the girl a gift from the Araby bazaar. His late journey through the dim, disappointing market brings fantasy into hard contact with reality.

Fifteen linked stories set in Dublin, following children, clerks, families, lovers, and neighbors at moments of disappointment or realization. It is a strong entry point to Joyce, with vivid city life and quietly painful human choices.

At a Dublin boarding house, Mrs. Mooney sees a chance to secure her daughter Polly’s future after Polly grows close to lodger Bob Doran. Social pressure, money, and reputation make a private mistake impossible to keep private.

At a Dublin holiday gathering, Gabriel Conroy worries over speeches, old tensions, and his uneasy marriage. A quiet conversation after the party changes how he sees his wife, himself, and the emotional distance between people.

Lenehan wanders Dublin while his friend Corley courts a young servant woman. As Lenehan waits for the outcome of Corley’s scheme, the story exposes a small, cruel con shaped by boredom, vanity, and need.

Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin, wrestling with school, family, faith, sexuality, and the demands of Irish life. As he begins to trust his own artistic calling, he must decide what loyalties he can keep and what he must leave behind.

Writer Richard Rowan returns to Dublin with Bertha and their young son after years abroad. When an old friend pursues Bertha, the couple confront jealousy, desire, freedom, and whether love can survive without control.

Over one day, June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom moves through Dublin while Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom follow their own paths. Errands, conversations, memories, and private thoughts build an unusually intimate portrait of a city and its people.

This slim collection contains thirteen poems written across two decades. Love, grief, memory, music, and passing time recur in compressed pieces that offer a quieter, more direct side of Joyce’s writing.

A gathering of Joyce’s published poetry, including the poems of Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach alongside other work. It lets readers follow his interest in songlike language, private feeling, and carefully controlled short forms.

A playful children’s tale first written for Joyce’s grandson. In this strange Copenhagen, cats are everywhere and nothing is quite as it seems, giving the story a comic edge beneath its fanciful animal world.

Joyce’s final novel turns a nighttime family drama into a dreamlike flow of puns, echoes, and shifting identities. Centered loosely on the Earwicker family, it rewards readers willing to listen to its language as much as follow a conventional plot.

This unfinished early novel follows Stephen Daedalus as he struggles with family pressure, religion, friendship, and his wish to become an artist. It offers a rougher, more expansive first version of material Joyce later remade in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Essays, reviews, lectures, and newspaper pieces from Joyce’s early career. These lively, often argumentative writings show his thoughts on drama, language, Irish culture, literature, and the artistic debates that shaped his fiction.

In the French town of Beaugency, a mayor makes a risky bargain with the Devil to get a bridge built. This witty children’s fable follows the townspeople as they look for a clever way around the deal.

This three-volume gathering of Joyce’s correspondence follows his life from early ambitions through his later years. The letters bring together family matters, literary friendships, publishing battles, financial strain, and the slow construction of his major books.

A short, fragmentary prose poem set in Trieste, where an English teacher becomes infatuated with a young student. Its quick impressions of streets, lessons, desire, and restraint offer an intimate glimpse of Joyce working between poetry and fiction.

A curated selection of Joyce’s letters, spanning his writing life and personal world. They show the novelist as a working writer, family man, friend, and determined negotiator with publishers, editors, and fellow artists.

This correspondence traces Joyce’s long working relationship and friendship with Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses. The letters reveal practical worries about editions, money, corrections, travel, and the day-to-day work behind his books.

A posthumously published set of ten short prose pieces written in 1923. These compact, comic, and experimental narratives offer a glimpse of Joyce testing language, Irish material, and ideas that would later surface in Finnegans Wake.