With Bloomsday, just a couple of days away, there’s not much time to brush up on your Joyce. However, a good place to start is James Joyce: A Critical Guide, by Lee Spinks, whose cover includes this image of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses.

Spinks offers a comprehensive account of Joyce’s work and provides a detailed textual analysis of each of his major works. Spinks discusses the biographical, historical, political, and social contexts that inform Joyce’s writing and multiple strands of criticism that have been proposed over the last eighty years. The book’s combination of close reading and critical breadth makes it an ideal companion for the range of Joyce readers.

Throughout the week, we’ll feature Joyce- and Bloomsday-related material, much of which comes from the recently published The Letters of Sylvia Beach. In her letters, Beach, who was the first publisher of Joyce, recounts some of the trials and tribulations of bringing Ulysses to print.