'Little jets of wheezing laughter followed one another out of his convulsed body. His eyes, twinkling with cunning enjoyment, glanced at every moment towards his companion's face.'

'When he was quite sure that the narrative had ended he laughed noiselessly for fully half a minute. Then he said:

- Well...! That takes the biscuit!'

James Joyce's naturalistic, unflinching portrayal of ordinary working people in his Dubliners stories was a literary landmark. These four stories from that collection offer glimpses of defeated lives - an unremarkable death, a theft, a desperate plan, a failed writer's dream - yet each creates a compelling and ultimately redemptive vision of a city and of human experience.