To read James Joyce is to encounter a radical idiom in service of indiscriminate observation. What emerges is a reeling vision of daily life, somehow the more revitalized for having been born out in prose. In celebration of one of the author, we're sharing some of our favorite writing on Joyce, from the icily qualified criticism of Rebecca West to Louis Menand's portrait of a sometimes emiserated writer with his own scale of import.

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"Silence, Exile, Punning: A Critic at Large" by Louis Menand
The New Yorker, July 2, 2012 (via ProQuest Research Library)
In Louis Menand's hands, "Sunny Jim," as Joyce was called, becomes a figure not only of capital-G genius but also a human being. Studded with wonderful details about everything from his preferred writing position (sprawled over a bed) to his manic fortunes to meeting Dwight MacDonald, this profile is an excellent choice for the reader who doesn't want her literary biographies as long as Ulysses.

"What to Make of Finnegans Wake?" by Michael Chabon
The New York Review of Books, July 12, 2012
"To write a novel is to betray it, and in this regard Finnegans Wake is only a book like any other; but it’s also, at the same time, a celebration of that betrayal, as wakes are always celebrations, and an act of defiance against the impossibility of realizing the dream... The limits of language are not the stopping point, says the Wake; they are the point at which we must begin to tell the tale," writes novelist Michael Chabon in his essay on Joyce. Both a musing on the novel and the story of Chabon's initial rejection of the book and his eventual year-long reconciliation with it, the essay takes on the critic's charge that Finnegans Wake is fantastical, finding instead a generative failure.

"The Magic of Dubliners" by Alexander Aciman
TIME, June 16, 2014
Aciman interprets Joyce's gift to be an ability to make seemingly insignificant lives matter. "This is, perhaps, the magic of Dubliners," he writes. "The stories convince us that they and their characters are almost unimportant until they kick us in the heart."

"The Strange Case of James Joyce" by Rebecca West
Bookman, September 1928 (via American Periodicals Series (Collection I))
For the person who never quite got what all the fuss was about, Rebecca West's  essay on Joyce may offer a tinge of vindication. In it, West admits Joyce to be a genius but criticizes him for a lack of taste and suggests the author a slave to sentimentality. She notes great beauty, but also pummels him as she notes some of his work to be "wild flounder" and observing "finger-prints of literary incompetence."

"Tschink With Tschunk" by James Longenbach
The Nation, June 23-30, 2014 (via Academic Search Premier)
And finally, a tip for the would-be reader of Ulysses: "Any satisfying account of Ulysses must refuse the glamour of mastery, allowing us to recognize that the novel is always other than what we say it is, especially when what we say is accurate."