James Joyce’s “The Sisters” & “An Encounter” (Short Story Discussion)

James Joyce’s Dubliners, first published in 1914, stands as one of the greatest and most influential short story collections in the English language. Offering an unflinching yet deeply evocative portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century, it serves as both a meditation on a city in stagnation and a moral history of a people whose “golden age” has passed. Joyce’s characters — at once profoundly Irish and universally resonant — linger in the reader’s mind, their inner lives rendered with striking psychological depth. Through prose that is at once mesmerizing and meticulously crafted, Joyce captures the rhythms of Dublin speech and the quiet struggles of its citizens with extraordinary realism. This collection of fifteen stories represents Joyce at his most accessible and, arguably, his most profound. (Penguin)

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This is a series of occasional meetups to discuss short stories by various authors. We started in the fall of 2023 and generally meet on Sunday evenings. Authors we have read include Haruki Murakami, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, James Baldwin, Feng Menglong, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

This time we will begin our reading of James Joyce's Dubliners with the first 2 stories in the collection, "The Sisters" and "An Encounter". In "The Sisters", a young boy grapples with the death of a priest, and in "An Encounter", two schoolboys skip class for an adventure but find themselves unnerved by an encounter with a strange man.

Please read the stories in advance (~20 pages in total) and bring your thoughts, queries, and favourite passages to share with us at the discussion.

A pdf copy of the text is available here (with handy footnotes for Irishisms! 🍀)