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A good place to start with Joyce, the other option being A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This set of short stories manages to convey an abundance of nuance (in other words, get crap past the radar) while remaining firmly focused on the exceedingly ordinary. "The Dead" is definitely the highlight of this collection, but the rest of the stories lead up to it in a series of thematic arcs, the first of which is a set of stories focused on childhood, then on adolescence, on young adulthood, and finally on the prime of one's life and accompanying decline, bringing us full circle in a sense to the death with which the first story begins. This loose sense of connectedness across otherwise unrelated stories helped to keep me interested as I jumped from one to another, and after I finished and caught my breath, I immediately found myself wanting to read the collection again from the beginning.
Note: In following Frank Delaney's podcast Re:Joyce, I got not only some much needed help in making sense of Ulysses but also a series of explorations relating to the short stories in Dubliners. Certainly these stories require no aid to follow (unlike Joyce's later work) but Delaney was certainly of help in teasing out another dimension of meaning from this work.
Note: In following Frank Delaney's podcast Re:Joyce, I got not only some much needed help in making sense of Ulysses but also a series of explorations relating to the short stories in Dubliners. Certainly these stories require no aid to follow (unlike Joyce's later work) but Delaney was certainly of help in teasing out another dimension of meaning from this work.