&quot;Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?...To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own.&quot;<br><br>-- James Joyce, in a letter to his brother<br><br>With these fifteen stories James Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest (&quot;The Sisters&quot;), the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of &quot;Two Gallants,&quot; or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife (&quot;The Dead&quot;), Joyce takes narrative places it had never been before.<br><br>The text of this edition has been newly edited by Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and is followed by a new afterword, chronology, and bibliography by John S. Kelly. Also included in a special appendix are the original versions of three stories as well as Joyce's long-suppressed Preface to Dubliners.