**Having done the longest day in literature with his monumental** Ulysses **, James Joyce set himself even greater challenges for his next book — the night.**
A nocturnal state…That is what I want to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream. The work, which would exhaust two decades of his life and the odd resources of some sixty languages, culminated in the 1939 publication of Joyce’s final and most revolutionary masterpiece, *Finnegans Wake*.
A story with no real beginning or end (it ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence), this book of Doublends Jined is as remarkable for its prose as for its circular structure. Written in a fantantic dream language, forged from polyglot puns and portmanteau words, the *Wake* features some of Joyce’s most brilliant inventive work. Sixty years after its original publication, it remains, in Anthony Burgess’s words, a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page.
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