"This is a people's Ulysses -- a text which, while grounded in the most comprehensive analysis of the manuscripts ever undertaken, has been smuggled out of the ivory tower of the academics and put squarely into the marketplace. It is designed preeminently for the lover of literature, and the aesthetic qualities -- the sense, the sound and the flow of words -- have been subjected to a refinement which only a craftsman, not a scholar alone, could hope to bring to bear. The Reader's Edition liberates the text from the prion of its early publishing history and makes it possible for the first time for the general reader to relish every nuance and beauty of Joyce's masterpiece" - Danis Rose

Here's what Picador has to say about Danis Rose's "Reader's Edition" of Ulysses:

Ulysses -- unquestionably one of the greatest novels in the English language and the text most central to the psyche of modern man and woman -- tells the sadly comic story of Leopold Bloom, a good man led by love, attempting to come to terms with loss: the deaths of his son and his father, the departure of his daughter from home, the passing of his youth and the adultery of his wife. Joyce meticulously recreates the place and time -- Dublin, 16 June 1904 -- in which Bloom, in the midst of the vicissitudes of an otherwise nondescript day, contemplates the void of uncertainty where we all stand.

First published in Paris in 1922 by an amateur publisher, Ulysses as a text has been dogged from the first by a string of bad, indifferent, or misguided 'definitive' editions. Now at last, seventy-five years after its first publication, Picador is proud to present a completely redesigned and comprehensively edited text of James Joyce's masterpiece: a Ulysses for our time.

Danis Rose's editing is informed by a radical new appraisal of the history of Joyce's writing of Ulysses and of the documents which constitute the manuscript of the book. By combining the better features of current theories of text-editing, previously assumed to be incompatible, he has removed a plethora of small, yet not insignificant, obstructions between writer and reader that have hitherto marred the enjoyment of this most human and extraordinary of novels.

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest surviving son of the sociable but irresponsible John Joyce from County Cork, and a pious and reserved mother, Mary Jane Murray. His childhood and early manhood coincided with a fall in the family fortunes from well-to-do to impoverished. In 1903 he began to write Stephen Hero, an autobiographical novel left unfinished. In the following year he left Ireland accompanied by Nora Barnacle, a young Galway girl, and remained with her for the rest of his life through an unending series of migrations from flat to flat and hotel to hotel, centering on the cities of Trieste, Zurich and Paris. In the course of this long odyssey, and in the face of great adversity, he composed, in addition to shorter works, four of the acknowledged masterpieces of English literature: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. He died in Zurich in 1941 of undiagnosed peritonitis and was survived by his wife Nora (died 1951), two children, Giorgio (died 1976) and Lucia (died 1982), and a grandson, Stephen.

Danis Rose is one of the world's leading experts on James Joyce. He has written and edited some of the more important books and articles in the field. These include: The James Joyce Archive: Volumes 28-63 (1977-78, with David Hayman); The Index Manuscript (1978); The Lost Notebook (1989, with John O'Hanlon); 'Ireland and James Joyce' (Joyce Studies Annual 1992); The Textual Diaries of James Joyce (1995); Ulysses in Genesis (forthcoming); and the four-part critical edition of Finnegans Wake (forthcoming). He was born in Dublin where he now lives.

"BOLD AND BRILLIANT AND ALSO CONFIDENT AND CONTROVERSIAL" - Michael Groden, Professor of English, University of Western Ontario

"THIS MAY BE THE HANDY, USABLE ULYSSES THAT WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR" - Fritz Senn, Director, Zurich James Joyce Foundation

ISBN 0-330-35229-6, 739 pages, 6 1/4"x9 3/4", $39.99, hardcover

AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK THIS JULY!
ISBN 0-330-35230-X, 832 pages, $17.99, paperback

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Cover illustration by Michelle Thompson incorporates a line drawing portrait of James Joyce by Constantin Brancusi © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 1997