The Joyce Girl

The Joyce Girl

Lucia Joyce was the daughter of James Joyce – ill-fated indeed to live in the shadow of such genius. Beloved yet unseen, in the manner of so many women, her own enormous talent and creative drive were subsumed in her father’s. Her tragic fate shadows this novel, dogging the reader with sad inevitability. I’m not giving […]

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica […]

Paris exhibition to celebrate life and work of Oscar Wilde

Paris exhibition to celebrate life and work of Oscar Wilde

Manuscripts, photographs, paintings and personal items among the displays in honour of playwright who died in city. Paris will hold its first major exhibition on the life and work of Oscar Wilde next month, co-curated by his grandson. Wilde, who spoke fluent French, was an ardent Francophile who regularly visited the city, eventually dying there […]

Scientists Discover That James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Has an Amazingly Mathematical “Multifractal” Structure

Scientists Discover That James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Has an Amazingly Mathematical “Multifractal” Structure

It has long been thought that the so-called “Golden Ratio” described in Euclid’sElements has “implications for numerous natural phenomena… from the leaf and seed arrangements of plants” and “from the arts to the stock market.” So writes astrophysicist Mario Livio, head of the science division for the institute that oversees the Hubble Telescope. And yet, […]

We Are All Smiley’s People

We Are All Smiley’s People

My wife, Susan, and I lost our minds. For more than two weeks at the beginning of February, we were locked in a ritual that became the center of our day, the center of our conversation—watching first the six-hour original 1979 BBC version of John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (not to be confused […]

Finnegans Wake – in pictures

Finnegans Wake – in pictures

A new illustrated edition of Finnegans Wake, as imagined by artist John Vernon Lord for the Folio Society, matches James Joyce’s extravagant word games with elaborately collaged pictures, shedding a brilliant new light on Irish literature’s ‘book of the dark’. Here, Lord explains the thinking behind the images. Frontispiece The frontispiece illustration doesn’t apply to […]