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James Joyce's Dubliners is a collection of short stories about the lives of the people of Dublin around the turn of the century. Each story describes a small but significant moment of crisis or revelation in the life of a particular Dubliner, sympathetically but always with stark honesty. Many of the characters are desperate to escape the confines of their humdrum lives, though those that have the opportunity to do so seem unable to take it.

An old man looks back on a chequered life, concealing truths he will not reveal until the end. Fire in the Blood starts quietly, lyrically, but then races away with narrative twists and surprise revelations. A young man, newly married, is found drowned in the mill stream; an old man is more concerned about the repayment of a debt than with his young wife; a young woman asks Silvio to plead her case; no-one is quite as they seem.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 1 collection. James Joyce's Dubliners is a collection of short stories about the lives of the people of Dublin around the turn of the century. Each story describes a small but significant moment of crisis or revelation in the life of a particular Dubliner, sympathetically but always with stark honesty. Many of the characters are desperate to escape the confines of their humdrum lives, though those that have the opportunity to do so seem unable to take it.

Holding none of the difficulties of Joyce's most powerful and moving prose. Holding none of the difficulties of Joyce's later novels, such as Ulysses, Dubliners is, in its way, just as radical. These stories introduce us to the city which fed Joyce's entire creative output, and to many of the characters who made it such a well of literary inspiration.

There is never enough time in Kinvara. When Helen Liddy is asked what she wants for her birthday, she says, "Time. That's what I want. Time." Fifteen-year-old JJ is continuing the Liddy family tradition with his fiddle-playing. But one day, he discovers that music might not be the only thing that runs in his veins. Was his great-grandfather was a murderer? When JJ sets out to buy his mother some time, he discovers the answer, as well as some truly remarkable things about music, myth, and magic.

Three men, Kevin, Dermot and Joe, stand and tell their stories on a bare stage. They never meet. Or do they? From this simplest of dramatic devices emerges a rounded tale of Irish life across the generations, accurate and poignant and therefore unforgettable: The poetry of ordinary life.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 1 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 1 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 1 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 2 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 2 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 2 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 1 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 2 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 1 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 1 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners , Volume 1 collection.

This is a story from the Dubliners, Volume 1 collection.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce describes the early life of Stephen Dedalus: significant memories from infancy, schooldays, family life, his first taste of sin, guilt, repentance - and his passage to freedom as he elects to leave Ireland forever. This is, in effect, an autobiography. Dedalus is Joyce; every person he encounters and every incident he experiences, is drawn from life. The writing, though, displays the colour and imagination of the very finest fiction.

These four works show Samuel Beckett at his most penetrating. Both Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Not I (1972) are among the most striking pieces written for the theatre in the 20th century. An old man sits at a table, playing back old tapes made when he was younger, mixed glimpses of past feelings. In Not I, we have just a mouth expressing memories and torment in a torrent of words.