Multiple Joyce – 27 June 2022
June 27 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
£10.00
In this centenary year of the publication of Ulysses we are delighted to welcome David Collard back to the Society with his new book, Multiple Joyce: One Hundred Short Essays About James Joyce’s Cultural Legacy (Sagging Meniscus Press, June 2022). Springing from the essays we’ll have readings, song and discussion to mark the UK launch of the book and to bring our season to a close. The night also features a grand giveaway of Joyce titles!
The story goes that a man in Zürich once asked James Joyce if he could kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses. Joyce declined, saying that it had done many other things as well. Multiple Joyce is a book inspired by those other things – it fizzes and astonishes at every turn, springing Joyces’ masterpiece free from the idolatry of academe and reminding us how strange and hip it must have seemed in 1922. John Mitchinson, co-host of Backlisted Podcast
Holding up a funhouse mirror to our times, Collard finds a multitude of Joyces, in often ludicrous disguises, wherever he looks—whether at Anthony Burgess, Cher, first editions, Flann O’Brien, Guinness, Hattie Jacques, John Cage, Kim Kardashian, Lego, Moby-Dick, numismatics, perfume, pianos, Princess Grace, puns, The Ramones, Sally Rooney, Stanley Unwin, Star Wars, waxworks or Zylo spectacles. Endlessly reinvented and exploited, Joyce emerges as a ubiquitous, indispensable and ruthlessly commodified Everyman. An excerpt riffing on Timon of Athens, Walter Benjamin and Ironman can be read on the RTÉ site. As Rónán Hession puts it in his foreword, Collard is above all “good company” and “I wish that the first time anyone heard about Joyce was from David Collard.” We’re delighted that Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul and Panenka will be joining Collard in discussion.
The event will be followed by a sale of Multiple Joyce and a signing by the author.
Collard’s Joyce nerdiness excels! Eimear McBride
Speaker: David Collard 
David Collard is a London-based writer, reviewer, researcher, editor and occasional broadcaster, appearing regularly in the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review and elsewhere, in print and online. Previous titles include About a Girl, a reader’s guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (C B Editions, 2016).
Speaker: Ronan Hession 
Rónán Hession is a writer and musician based in Dublin. His debut novel, Leonard and Hungry Paul, was published by Bluemoose Books in 2019. The book was shortlisted for numerous awards and chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the 50 great Irish novels of the 21st century. Ronán’s second novel Panenka follows 50-year-old Joseph in his attempts to make amends across the void created by his past mistakes.