You make it sound like the publication of Ulysses was a walk in the park. It wasn’t. Nobody wanted to publish Ulysses back in 1922 either. It was turned down by every publisher he approached, and in the end Joyce resorted to Sylvia Beach, an American woman who owned a bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare and Co. She published it out of her own pocket, and only 1000 copies were printed.

You said “why aren’t you publishing books that can be held up to those names?” but it’s hardly as though publishers have enormous piles of world-changing literature just languishing in their inboxes. Certainly, they might have some experimental pieces lying around, but experimental doesn’t necessarily mean good. Geniuses aren’t born every day. If someone would WRITE something brilliant, even if publishers shied away from it, I feel sure it would find its way out into the world sooner or later. After all, in this age of mass-communication word-of-mouth is more powerful than it has ever been.

And Tom Stoppard said about james Joyce, “An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice be universally recognized.”

And Tom Stoppard said about james Joyce, “An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice be universally recognized.”