One of the first books to sum up the contribution of James Joyce, this volume remains an essential guide to the works of a great innovator of modern literature. Because Harry Levin’s view is large, as opposed to the many necessary exegeses and close textual studies, he leads the reader easily into the delights to be found in Joyce, from the comparatively simple prose of Dubliners, through Ulysses and into the complexities of Finnegans Wake.…

Harry Levin’s Memories of the Moderns, originally published by New Directions in 1980, is now presented in New Directions Paperbook format. This gathering of prose pieces––reviews, essays, lectures, introductions, personal recollections, and epistles, written for the most part during the 1970s––combines criticism with reminiscence and is both an exploration of the idea of modernism within the international frame of comparative literature and a valediction. By now, what was so avant-garde, experimental, difficult, and sometimes shocking in the writings of the twentieth-century modernists has permanently altered our literature––the groundbreakers have become our classics.…