Ulysses

One day in Dublin, 16 June 1904: an advertising canvasser buys a kidney for breakfast, goes to a funeral, argues in a newspaper office, watches a girl on the strand, drinks in a maternity hospital and brings a drunk poet home. Joyce set every scene against an episode of the Odyssey and worked seven years on it in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. It was seized and burned before a Paris press printed it in 1922. Fifty-seven paintings by Walter Osborne and John Butler Yeats, among others, catch the city's parks, boats and mourning, matching Joyce's Dublin day scene for scene.