Ulysses — James Joyce

A novel that follows Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, a young poet, through a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904. Mapping their wanderings onto Homer's Odyssey, Joyce transforms the mundane details of city life into a modern epic: meals eaten, funerals attended, pubs visited, a birth witnessed, and a homecoming achieved. Beneath it all runs the quiet heroism of Bloom's compassion and Molly's earth-affirming final monologue.

Now universally regarded as the greatest English-language novel of the twentieth century, Ulysses revolutionized what fiction could do — with interior monologue, radical style shifts, and an encyclopedic embrace of the everyday. Its influence reaches from Faulkner and Woolf to Pynchon and Rushdie. Every episode invents a new form to match its content, making the novel itself a laboratory for the possibilities of prose.