To prepare for reading Ulysses, people should first read James Joyce’s Dubliners and then his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (both available from Norton [2005]), because Ulysses in a sense is the sequel to the collection of stories and the autobiographical novel.

Originally published in 1930 and reprinted several times by Vintage Books, Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is the essential starting place for decoding the novel. Gilbert worked closely with Joyce and got the author’s approval for this interpretation of the novel. Gilbert’s writing is formal and complex, but it expresses the vision of the novel Joyce himself hoped to impart to readers.

Richard Ellmann wrote James Joyce, the definitive biography of Joyce, published by Oxford University Press in 1983.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a stream-of-consciousness novel about a day in the post–World War I London life of Clarissa Dalloway, wife of a member of Parliament, as she prepares to give a party that night. An excellent annotated edition edited by Mark Hussey appeared in 2005.