Search Results for 'Molly Bloom'

Siobhán Giollamhuire McKenna was born on May 24, 1922, a second daughter to Eoghan McKenna and Gretta O’Reilly, Nancy being her older sister. She was educated in Belfast, in Taylor’s Hill Convent and then after a year out sick with glandular fever, as a boarder in St Louis Convent, Monaghan.

1930s New York was a town of shebeens, jazz, sex and... Ulysses. It was the era of Prohibition and James Joyce's novel - like liquor - was much in demand, but could only be bought under the counter. Until, that was, a feisty young publisher sailed to Paris to buy the rights from Joyce, hired the best free speech lawyer in the land, and took a case to liberate Ulysses from American censorship.

1930s New York was a town of shebeens, jazz, sex and... Ulysses. It was the era of Prohibition, and James Joyce's novel - like liquor - was much in demand, but available only illegally, until one man took a case…

On a late August afternoon my friend John Hill drove me across the city of Zurich, climbing the suburban heights until we stopped at the gates of Fluntern Cemetery. We walked up the last incline to where, among the trees and billard-table lawns, we saw the Joyces’ grave. There was no mistaking it. Just above the grave is the Giacometti-like sculpture of the writer himself, the work of American artist Milton Hebald. There James Joyce sits, in characteristic pose, deep in conversation, head tilted, one leg resting on the other knee, cigarette poised, his slim cane delicately balanced. Someone once remarked that he held his cane like a musical instrument.

A thrilling new adaptation of James Joyce's, Penelope Chapter, “Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom”, is set to come to the Town Hall Theatre on May 30.

THIS YEAR marks the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s groundbreaking work of modernist fiction, Ulysses, but while that book, and its author, are profoundly rooted in Dublin, Joyce himself had Galway connections.

MENTION NORA Barnacle and four things come to mind: she was from Galway; she was sexually adventurous and advanced for her day; she was the partner and muse of James Joyce; and she never read a word he wrote.