This Vintage Classics edition of James Joyce s groundbreaking story collection has been authoritatively edited by scholars Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and includes a chronology bibliography and afterword by John S. Kelly. Also included in a special appendix are the original versions of three of the stories as well as Joyce s long-suppressed preface to Dubliners. With the fifteen stories in Dubliners Joyce reinvented the art of fiction using a scrupulous deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest ( The Sisters ) the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of Two Gallants or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife ( The Dead ) Joyce takes narrative art to places it had never been before.