Five best books about Ireland

Frank Delaney's novel Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show was recently published by Random House.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of books on Ireland. One title on the list:

Ulysses
by James Joyce
1922

Try it again—be patient, and this time you'll finish. And this time "Ulysses" will repay the effort. Inside these nearly 300,000 words, written by the great, semi-blind Modernist, lies a spiritual trove. Joyce's tenet—in the particular lies the universal—captures two beliefs that could power the world: that there is no such thing as a person too unimportant for art's focus; and that love of fellow man, with its attendant forgiveness, does indeed conquer all. Reading about the urban peregrinations of the unaudacious Leopold Bloom on a single June day in 1904, you will encounter the English language in its widest variety, from the street patois of Edwardian Dublin to sentences and paragraphs as classically beautiful and vivacious as Mozart's notes.

Read about another book on Delaney's list.

Ulysses also made John Mullan's lists of the ten of the best parodies, ten of the best visits to the lavatory, and ten of the best vegetables in literature. Unsurprisingly, it appears on Frank Delaney's top ten list of Irish novels.

--Marshal Zeringue