Toklas, the Pounds, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Louis Aragon, and countless others who Beach affectionately called "the crowd." To this day, the bookshop on the Left Bank of Paris (although not its original location) serves as a haven for anyone willing to put in some work for a cozy bed and historic board. Soon, her rag and bone shop Shakespeare and Company became a haven for ex-pats, iconoclasts, and the wayward, among them Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Who would have thought that one of the movers and shakers of the Western literary world would be a girl from Baltimore? Sylvia Beach, a Presbyterian pastor’s daughter, grew up in New Jersey with dreams of moving to Paris, then the literary hub of Europe, with an "obsession" to have a bookshop of her own. Recognized as one of the most important works in the English language, the publication history of Ulysses is itself a drama worthy of an exploratory revisiting. Thousands of events in Dublin and the world over celebrate the characters in the novel with marathon 30+ hour readings, film screenings, pub crawls, lectures, and all sorts of festivities. Bloomsday is named after the titular character Leopold “Poldy” Bloom. This year marks the centenary of the publication of the work which may be most famous for being the one novel most readers start and slog through but rarely finish. June 16 marks Bloomsday, a day of celebration in honor of Irish writer James Joyce’s seminal novel Ulysses (1922).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |