The economy James Joyce achieves in Dubliners is astonishing. I’m currently reading it for the second time, and on my first go around I really don’t think I fully appreciated how much the stories, beneath their outward plainness, burst with meaning. In Araby, one of my favourites, Joyce gives us the stirrings of a boy’s adolescence, his first experience of passionate romantic and sexual feeling, his journey to what he imagines to be an exotic bazaar full of Eastern wonders, and his abrupt pang of disenchantment as he passes from boyhood into an adult world that’s nothing like what he imagined. All in less than 1,500 words.

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