Bloomsday

"Marilyn Monroe" Eve Arnold (1955)

It's Bloomsday, the annual celebration of Leopold Bloom's journey around Dublin on June 16, 1904, in James Joyce's Ulysses. Since its publication in 1922 in Paris by Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company and one of Joyce's biggest supporters, the book has baffled and delighted generations of readers. Once labelled obscene and banned from the US and Britain, Ulysses is now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and is a part of the literary canon.

If you've never read Ulysses, you should give it a go, even if you read just one chapter. As T.S. Eliot said, "I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."

Marathon readings and Bloomsday parties are going on all over the globe today. To find out about Bloomsday events near you, visit here.