“Chris McCabe fortunately has the talent to match his chutzpah and, in dismantling and reassembling Joyce’s novel, he has created a complex and original work of fiction that is much more than pastiche.” – David Collard, Literary Review

Chris McCabe playfully reclaims the inventive spirit of the founding text of Modernism; Ulysses. Tracing the same structure as the original, McCabe describes the events of the following day, 17th June 1904. Stephen Dedalus wakes up, hungover, with scores and debts to settle, unaware that Leopold Bloom is waking up in Eccles street with his own plans for him.

Dedalus is shot through with cut and paste disruptions from the Digital Age. From ’80s Text Adventure gaming to Google maps and pop-ups. McCabe picks up the tradition of Laurence Sterne and B.S. Johnson, underpinning the paragraphs of his storytelling with concrete poetry.

This novel is haunted (by Hamlet). This novel has a subconscious. This novel has therapy. This novel gives right of reply to Joyce’s self-portrait and questions the foundations of narrative storytelling. This truly is a hotly anticipated moment in Fiction. 

“Chris McCabe has a poet’s ear for Joyce’s prose style and the literary chops to square up to the daunting original; the result is Ulysses accelerated, improved and reduced.” – Republic of Consciousness Prize Judges.

Artists’ Book

About the Author

Chris McCabe is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Speculatrix (Penned in the Margins). Pharmapoetica, with Maria Vlotides, was shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award and his plays Shad Thames, Broken Wharf and Mudflats have been performed in Liverpool and London. His non-fiction series, searching for a great lost poet in one of London’s Magnificent Seven cemeteries, begins with In the Catacombs: a Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery (selected as an LRB Bookshop book of the year) and Cenotaph South: Mapping the Lost Poets of Nunhead Cemetery. He co-edited, with Victoria Bean, The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Publishing, 2015).