An Irishman from Dublin, Joyce is mostly known for his novels, though he wrote poetry, plays, and essays. His multi-lingual allusions and puns have given many a reader conniptions—there should be a rule that everyone who finishes Ulysses gets a gold star, and everyone who finishes Finnegan's Wake gets a freaking gold brick.

Finnegan's Wake

Joyce studied a number of languages. Many of these, including even Esperanto, turn up as puns and references in Finnegan's Wake, making this novel the single hardest book to get through in the (mostly) English language.

Dubliners

These stories, on the other hand, are easy to get through. They're also brilliant. Joyce's short stories changed the way people write short stories in English. They are much less Avant-garde (read: readable) than Joyce's novels, but still focus on individual consciousness.

Do yourself a favor and read these bad boys. They're beautiful, they're (comparatively) easy, and they kind of exemplify what kind of awesomeness can come out of the genre of the short story. You will thank yourself (and your good buddy Shmoop).

Ulysses

What can we say? If you've read Finnegan's Wake, you'll think this novel is easy. And even if you haven't (and think that Ulysses is the hardest book in the universe) you'll think this novel is genius. You kind of have to: everyone else does.

Ulysses was famously banned in some countries because it's pretty dang filthy: there's masturbation and sexytimes galore.

It's also famous for its strategy of shifting narrative styles and points of view from one chapter to another and for juxtaposing the life of everyday Dublin to mythological events and figures from Homer's Odyssey. This was Joyce's way of suggesting that any subject is fit fodder for art. Or maybe he's just showing off?

Chew on This:

As we've seen, lots of Modernist works, both poetry and fiction, plunge us into the interior worlds of their characters. Why might these writers—especially Joyce—want to do that?

As T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922) did for poetry, Ulysses changed people's ideas about what a novel is and what it can do. Joyce, more than any author before him, realized that how you write about something determines what you can write about. In other words, form is inseparable from content, and content from form.