London Review Bookshop: Tom McCarthy and Susan Philipsz on Ulysses

That Year Again: a series of special events marking some of 2022’s many significant centenaries, inspired by the writing about them in the LRB archive.

See in the start of the 100th anniversary celebrations for literary modernism’s year zero on the day Ulysses was published (on James Joyce’s 40th birthday), in the company of the twice Booker-nominated novelist Tom McCarthy and the Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz. Their conversation will be streamed live from Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the bookshop indelibly associated with Joyce’s novel because it was in the window of Sylvia Beach’s shop of the same name that Ulysses was displayed for the first time on 2 February 1922.

‘How do you write after Ulysses?’ asked McCarthy, author of C, Satin Island and most recently The Making of Incarnation, in the LRB in 2014. He’ll reflect on working in Ulysses’s wake – as we all must – with Philipsz, whose past installations have drawn extensively on Joyce’s writing (and interest in music). She’ll also be singing live.

Presented in partnership with Shakespeare and Company. Photo credits: Nicole Strasser and Franziska Sinn