A PINT OF ULYSSES with your hosts Robert Berry and Patrick Hastings.

UNRAVELING ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST COMPLICATED BOOKS.

A PODCAST OR TWO AT A TIME.

Have you been fascinated about James Joyce’s tour-de-force novel, and curious why diverse fans from around the world consider ULYSSES to be one of the greatest works of literary modernism? You may have tried to read it yourself, perhaps more than once, and put it back on the shelf just as many frustrated readers before you. You’re in good company. And we have one tip to offer: Don’t go it alone.

Hosts Robert Berry and Patrick Hastings bring their knowledge and humor to first-time readers, avid returners, Joycean puzzle-jugglers, creatives and people who love an intellectual and cultural challenge. The longtime Joyceheads will talk to writers, Joyce scholars and various artists with an accessible approach to unfurling the Irish epic one episode at a time.

2022 marks the centenary of the first publication of this breakthrough work in which The New York Times disparaged that only a “few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend” the novel in its 1922 review. James Joyce’s early champions included poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and novelist Ernest Hemingway. Breaking all the established rules of the Gilded Age’s sensibilities, Joyce allowed for us to enjoy our current right of freedom of expression in the United States by winning a landmark obscenity court case.

Robert Berry is a painter, cartoonist and educator raised in Detroit and now living in Philadelphia. He has been adapting Joyce’s work into comics and other media for over a dozen years and now teaches ULYSSES and comics at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the Rosenbach Museum and library. Robert has participated in numerous Bloomsday events throughout the world, and occasionally still finds time to make pretty pictures.

Patrick Hastings is the creator of ulyssesguide.com, which shares the wonders and wisdom of Ulysses with a wide variety of readers from around the world. He is the English Department Chair at Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland. Patrick has studied, written about, taught, and conducted research into Joyce and Ulysses since 2003, when he lived and worked at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore on the Left Bank of Paris (the current iteration of the literary institution that first published Ulysses in 1922). He had some of his work published in the James Joyce Quarterly in 2015.