The Joyce of Everyday Life

"A brilliant, lively guide to the joys of reading Joyce for intellectual stimulation and personal growth. With characteristic verve and lucidity, Mahaffey reminds us how Joyce’s words make us come alive to life and language as we glimpse ourselves in his nicely polished mirrors. Both new and veteran readers will benefit from Mahaffey's deep, witty engagements with Joyce’s fictions." ~Robert Spoo, author of Modernism and the Law

“An ode to the necessity for interpretive autonomy, Vicki Mahaffey’s The Joyce of Everyday Life joyfully explores the networks and coincidences and echoes and repetitions of James Joyce’s texts. Where other literary critics tell what a book is about, Mahaffey shows readers how to move through Joyce’s language. They could not have a better guide." ~Katherine O’Callaghan, editor of Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism

"At once a primer for reading Joyce and a parallactic rereading of familiar places in Joyce’s work. It is also a model of great reading and writing, eloquently conveying a practice of encounter, as its title suggests, with everyday subjects such as beds, love, fat, letters of all kinds, etc., through which Mahaffey brings Joyce down from the rarefied air. The book is rich with critical surprises. Don’t miss them.” ~Marilyn Reizbaum, author of Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism

“Mahaffey shows that there is much to be learned about everyday life in Joyce’s fiction. However, Joyce does not drop chestnuts of wisdom for readers along a primrose path. Instead, he forges trails of potential self-discovery through a dense and thorny thicket of words. Mahaffey is the perfect guide to the rich forms of everyday self-reflection available to readers when navigating the language of Joyce’s selva oscura.” ~David Rando, author of Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce

"Feels like a book Joyce himself might have used as a glossary of sorts to explain his own thinking, his own word choice and word construction, and his own use of symbols—the symbols of everyday life including beds, handwriting, salmon, and love. After all, 'everyday life' is a recurring theme in Joyce’s work, and this book offers an intriguing and novel way 'in.'" ~Kelsey Scouten Bates, The John C. Haas Director, The Rosenbach