That Year Again: Tom McCarthy and Susan Philipsz on Ulysses

We saw 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 was 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 reflected 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).

Presented in partnership with Shakespeare and Company.