Conversations with James Joyce

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"A memoir of one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century, never before published in North America. 'In the ordinary sense Joyce was not a conversationalist,' writes Arthur Power, author of Conversations with James Joyce. An aspiring painter and art critic, Power (of the famous whiskey family) struck up a strained, somewhat prickly friendship with the master of exile, silence, and cunning at the Bal Bullier in Paris, in the year of 1921. This volume is Power's record of the two men's encounters and conversations, whose subjects ranged from Irish literature to American politics, and from Assyrian monuments to the individual 'odor of a country,' which, Joyce assured his wide-eyed interlocutor, was 'the gauge of its civilization.' Here is a rare glimpse of the private Joyce to Power's great surprise, not a brash bohemian, but a steadily working, sharp-tongued, elusive man"--