A Shorter Ulysses

This volume is a major event in both the James Joyce and Anthony Burgess literary annals. It not any marks the first publication of Burgess’s Shorter Ulysses, which was only recently discovered in the Burgess archives, but also the first republication this century of Burgess’s extraordinary musical play Blooms of Dublin, based of course on Ulysses. The play has not been available in print for 38 years. Indeed it was only once performed (but as a radio production) on the centenary of Joyce’s birth on February 2nd 1982. Burgess’s A Shorter Finnegans Wake, published in 1966, is still much loved and probably enjoyed more than Joyce’s full length—and very difficult—novel. A Shorter Ulysses follows the same formula of being both an abridgement of the text (actually quite an intense one) and the provision of comments interspersed within the text. A Shorter Ulysses is introduced by Burgess's biographer and Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Andrew Biswell. It also contains Burgess’s foreword to the BCA edition of Ulysses published in 1981— a two thousand word piece which manages to capture the very essence of Joyce’s masterwork and provides a perfect introduction to the novel, particularly for new readers. So, within these pages, there is a feast for Joyce and Burgess scholars as well as a totally accessible gateway to Ulysses for readers who perhaps have yet to dive into the deep waters of one of the most iconic—and of course controversial—novels of modern times.