In anticipation of the Irish Rep's performance of The Dead, get to know the intricacies of the short story in this lecture. “The Dead” is the chilling, brilliant final story of James Joyce’s “mosaic novel,” Dubliners (1914). The setting is a conventional annual Christmas gathering which gradually implodes into soul-searching revelations about the limits and the promise of a marriage. Many believe that “The Dead” is one of the finest stories ever written.

Robert J. Seidman is a novelist and Emmy-winning screenwriter. His most recent novel, Moments Captured, is based loosely on the work and life of the pioneering 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, inventor of the first – or second - motion picture camera. Seidman’s One Smart Indian is a novel about a Northern Cheyenne youth set in mid-nineteenth century America. He is finishing a novel about Joseph Pulitzer’s ace reporter, Nellie Bly.

With Don Gifford, Robert Seidman is co-author of Ulysses Annotated: An Annotation of James Joyce's Ulysses, University of California Press. This year the volume celebrated its half century anniversary. Seidman is working on a documentary film, Ulysses and Me, about the multiple pleasures and taunting mysteries of Joyce’s epic.