James Joyce's 'Dubliners' is a short story collection unlike any other. Each one is dense, loaded with references to the title city and to ideas of religious significance. Most appealing to me was its lyricism and narrative complexity. The order and sequence of the stories themselves, the first three told in first-person from a child's perspective, the middle ones concerning fatalistic bouts of heavy drinking, the last couple meditating on life itself, sometimes make the collection feel novelistic when connections between stories naturally occur to the reader. Still, each story, no matter the length, can stand on its own. My favorites were 'The Sisters', 'An Encounter', 'Araby', 'The Boarding House', 'A Little Cloud', 'Counterparts', 'Clay', 'A Painful Case', and 'A Mother'. Of course there is the final short story, more than twice the length of any other, 'The Dead', which is maybe the finest thing I've ever read and also likely the greatest short story of all time. "He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter." If literature is defined by characters then Joyce has created about thirty or so over the course of about 200 pages.