Joyce Audio – Audiobooks: Collections
- At September 30, 2022
- By Great Quail
- In Joyce
0
Joyce Audio: Audiobook Collections
This page profiles collections of Joyce’s work on audio. Some of these are compilations of individual readings and excerpts, while others are audiobook bundles, usually collecting Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses. These “bundles” are often priced as a single book: 1 credit on Audible. Most links take you Amazon, where you may listen to samples and download digital “aax” files for your Audible-enabled device. Other media such as LP, cassette, CD, MP3, and FLAC are listed separately.
Joyce Audio
[Main Page | His Own Voice | Collections | Dubliners | Portrait | Ulysses | Finnegans Wake | Drama & Poetry | Biography & Criticism | Miscellany]
James Joyce Soundbook
James Joyce Soundbook
Read by James Joyce, Cyril Cusack, Siobhán McKenna, and E.G. Marshall
Caedmon, 1971 (From materials recorded 1924-1971)
Available as: 4-LP Box Set | Cassettes
James Joyce Audio Collection
James Joyce Audio Collection
Read by James Joyce, Cyril Cusack, Siobhán McKenna, E.G. Marshall, Colm Meaney, and Jim Norton
Caedmon, 2002 (From materials recorded 1924-2000)
Available as: 4-CD Box Set | Brazen Head MP3
In order to describe this historic collection of recordings, it helps to understand the history of Caedmon Records. Established in 1952 by Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney, Caedmon was founded to record Dylan Thomas reading from his poetry. After a few false starts, the pair of Hunter graduates managed to get Thomas into the studio on 22 February 1952, only to discover the poet had forgotten his books. A quick trip to Gotham Book Mart offered a solution, and the recording was made, with Thomas reading five poems and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” The happy trio then adjourned to the nearby Anchor pub to celebrate.
Dylan Thomas Reading sold exceptionally well, and a second recording session was scheduled for 7 March 1953 at MIT. The session lasted until 4:00 am, at which time Dylan Thomas poured his beer over a passing cockroach and declared himself finished. Eight months later, he fell into a coma and died. The poems recorded during the March session were divided into three subsequent volumes of Dylan Thomas Reading, with previously-recorded readings and lectures used as filler. Caedmon’s Dylan Thomas records sold over a quarter million copies, and the company emerged as the premiere source for literary audio recordings, working with writers such as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and many others.
Caedmon Joyce Recordings
In 1959 Caedmon released the Finnegans Wake LP, a recording of Irish Shakespearean actors Siobhán McKenna and Cyril Cusack reading the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” and “Shem the Penman” episodes from Finnegans Wake. That same year they released A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, featuring Cyril Cusack reading excerpts from the novel. This LP was followed in 1960 by Ulysses: Soliloquies of Molly and Leopold Bloom, read by Siobhán McKenna and E.G. Marshall.
In 1970, Holdridge and Roney sold Caedmon to DC Heath & Company, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies. (Holdridge remained as president of Caedmon for another five years.) In 1971 Caedmon acquired Joyce’s famous recordings from the 1920s: the 1924 HMV recording of him reading the “Aeolus” episode from Ulysses, and the 1929 Cambridge recording of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” from Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake). These two recordings were paired as James Joyce Reading Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, with the remainder of the LP fleshed out by Cyril Cusack reading Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, and “Ecce Puer.” The liner notes included excerpts from Sylvia Beach’s memoirs. That same year they also released the James Joyce Soundbook, a 4-LP box set that contained all of Caedmon’s Joycean recordings to date.
In 1987 Caedmon was purchased by Harper & Row (now HarperCollins). In 1988 Caedmon released James Joyce Reading Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on cassette, confusing retitled The James Joyce Audio Collection. This cassette was released again in 1992 with different artwork, now more properly named James Joyce Reads. In 1995, the James Joyce Soundbook was published as a 4-cassette set. In 2000, Caedmon produced an unabridged reading of Dubliners with an all-star cast of Irish actors. In 2002, Caedmon finally released the James Joyce Soundbook on compact disc. To flesh out this 4-CD collection, they added a pair of stories from the Caedmon Dubliners. The resulting box set was called the James Joyce Audio Collection; the same title they used in 1988 for their first cassette release of James Joyce Reading Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
And that’s the not-at-all-confusing history of the Caedmon Joyce recordings! Here’s the contents of the 2002 James Joyce Audio Collection:
CD 1
1. James Joyce reads from Ulysses—passage from the “Aeolus” episode (1924)
2. Chamber Music, read by Cyril Cusack (1971)
3. James Joyce reads from Finnegans Wake—passage from “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (1929)
4. Pomes Penyeach, read by Cyril Cusack (1971)
5. “Ecce Puer,” read by Cyril Cusack (1971)
6. Dubliners—“Counterparts,” read by Jim Norton (2000)
CD 2
1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—Chapter I: The Beginning, read by Cyril Cusack (1959)
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—Chapter I: The Christmas Dinner, read by Cyril Cusack (1959)
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—Chapter IV, part 2, read by Cyril Cusack (1959)
4. Dubliners—“Araby,” read by Colm Meaney (2000)
CD 3
1. Ulysses: Soliloquy of Leopold Bloom, read by E.G. Marshall (1960)
2. Ulysses: Soliloquy of Molly Bloom, read by Siobhán McKenna (1960)
CD 4
1. Finnegans Wake—“Shem the Penman,” read by Cyril Cusack (1959)
2. Finnegans Wake—“Anna Livia Plurabelle,” read by Siobhán McKenna (1959)
Comments
This stellar collection is a “must have” for any Joycean. Its main star is the Irish actor Cyril Cusack (1910-1993), a member of the Royal Shakespearean Company and renown for his fluency in Gaelic. Cusack is a brilliant interpreter of Joyce, sensitive to the text’s abundant lyricism and stream-of-consciousness cadence. The readings are also well-chosen, giving Cusack the ability to show off his considerable range, from the childlike “tear out his eyes” mantra in Portrait to the poitín-soaked palaver of Finnegans Wake. Although he burdens Chamber Music with a gravitas the poems can scarcely bear, he skillfully navigates their archaic phrasings, elusive tensions, and frequent bouts of melancholy.
Cusack is well-partnered with his fellow Abby Theater alum Siobhán McKenna (1922-1986). Her rendition of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” is electrifying, rattled breathlessly like a juicy torrent of gossip before exhaustion winds things down to a whisper—one can almost hear her slowly transforming into “stem and stone.” And her Molly Bloom! I’ve heard numerous recitations of Molly’s celebrated soliloquy, but whenever I read Joyce’s original text, it’s McKenna’s voice I hear. Her reading is pitch-perfect: dramatic, bitchy, nostalgic, passionate, and defiant. Her counterpart is the American actor E.G. Marshall (1914-1998), who brings the same level of commitment to Bloom’s “soliloquy”—his rambling thoughts after masturbating in “Nausicaa,” from “Suppose I spoke to her?” to “Because you were so foreign from the others.” One line flows naturally into the next, Marshall’s voice striking all the right notes from bitingly salacious to hopelessly nostalgic.
While the Caedmon Dubliners is extensively reviewed on the Dubliners audio page, the two stories included here are a fine pair of examples. Colm Meaney’s account of “Araby” is voiced in a tone of adolescent confusion, filled with equal mixtures of naive longing and self-deprecating bitterness. Jim Norton narrates “Counterparts” with a dynamic range of theatrical devices—his Mr. Alleyne is quite a creation, and almost makes the onerous Farrington more sympathetic!
It’s unfortunate this storied collection is currently out of print, and Caedmon has never released it in digital form. Some of the pieces have appeared elsewhere, such as The Best of James Joyce, a compilation created by the mysterious “Saland Publishing.” (See below.) Fortunately, used copies of the Caedmon set can be found relatively easily, and are certainly worth the price. Having said that, I may know a guy who knows a guy, and if you really want to hear these recordings on MP3, meet me behind the pub…
James Joyce by Frank O’Connor
James Joyce by Frank O’Connor
Read by Frank O’Connor
Folkways, 1958
Available as: LP | Spotify
41 minutes 29 seconds
Founded by Moses Asch and Marian Distler in 1948, Folkways Records was primarily dedicated to folk music, but quickly evolved to include spoken-word recordings and “field recordings” of nature and world music. In 1986, Folkways was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, which has done a wonderful job of converting the impressive catalog to digital form. In 1958 Folkways recorded the celebrated Irish writer Frank O’Connor—former IRA solider and intimate of George “AE” Russell and W.B. Yeats—reading various selections from the work of James Joyce.
Contents:
Side One
Band 1: Introduction
Band 2: Dubliners
Band 3: “The Dead”
Band 4: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Band 5: A Portrait (Continued)
Band 6: A Portrait (Continued)
Side Two
Band 1: Ulysses
Band 2: Ulysses
Band 3: Finnegans Wake
Band 4: O’Connor On Joyce
Sadly, there’s no digital version of this album available online—although Spotify lists it, the tracks are greyed out as “unavailable.” In 1982 Paul Kresh commented on O’Connor’s reading for the New York Times:
Then there’s James Joyce by Frank O’Connor, with one Irishman looking the other in the eye as short-story writer and former Abbey Theatre director O’Connor delivers a rather irreverent but shrewd appraisal, interspersing nimble-tongued readings from the sacred texts with particular emphasis on A Portrait of the Artist because “it has not been closely studied and has I think been scarcely understood.”
The James Joyce Collection
The James Joyce Collection
Read by Gabriel Byrne
New Millennium Audio, 1992
Dove Audio, 1996
Blackstone, 2017
Aldo available as: MP3-CD
Abridged; 5 hours, 15 minutes
This collection of readings is performed by Gabriel Byrne, perhaps the most famous Irish actor of his generation and a lifetime interpreter of Joyce. Byrne played the role of Blazes Boylan in the 1982 TV film, Joyce In June, and has been responsible for various Joyce-related productions at the Irish Repertory Theatre in NYC. (And he played Lord Byron in Ken Russell’s bonkers 1986 film, Gothic!) Byrne takes a light touch with Joyce’s poetry, but invests the Dubliners stories with a restrained tension—hardly a surprise, his reading of “The Dead” is a highlight of the collection. Unfortunately, the set suffers from a lack of organization and poor indexing, with the poems from Chamber Music interspersed between the other readings. The selections from Chamber Music also curiously omit Poem XXXVI, “I Hear an Army,” often considered the finest piece in the collection.
Contents:
- Excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chamber Music I, “Strings in the Earth and Air”
- Chamber Music II, “The Twilight Turns”
- Dubliners—“The Sisters”
- Chamber Music III, “At That Hour”
- Dubliners—“An Encounter”
- Chamber Music IV, “When the Shy Star Goes Forth in Heaven”
- Dubliners—“Araby”
- Chamber Music V, “Lean Out of the Window”
- Chamber Music VI, “I Would in That Sweet Bosom Be”
- Chamber Music VII, “My Love Is in a Light Attire”
- Chamber Music VIII, “Who Goes Amid the Greenwood”
- Chamber Music IX, “Winds of May”
- Chamber Music X, “Bright Cap and Streamers”
- Dubliners—“Two Gallants”
- Chamber Music XI, “Bid Adieu”
- Chamber Music XII, “What Counsel Has the Hooded Moon”
- Chamber Music XIV, “My Dove, My Beautiful One”
- Dubliners—“Eveline”
- Chamber Music XV, “From Dewey Dreams”
- Chamber Music XVI, “O Cool Is the Valley Now”
- Dubliners—“Clay”
- Chamber Music XVII, “Because Your Voice Was at My Side”
- Chamber Music XIX, “Be Not Sad”
- Chamber Music XX, “In the Dark Pine-Wood”
- Chamber Music XXI, “He Who Hath Glory Lost”
- Chamber Music XXII, “Of That So Sweet Imprisonment”
- Dubliners—“A Painful Case”
- Chamber Music XXIII, “This Heart That Flutters Near My Heart”
- Chamber Music XXIV, “Silently She’ s Combing”
- Chamber Music XXV, “Lightly Come or Lightly Go”
- Chamber Music XXXII “Rain Has Fallen All the Day”
- Chamber Music XXXIII, “Now, O Now in This Brown Land”
- Chamber Music XXXIV, “Sleep Now, O Sleep Now”
- Chamber Music XXXV, “All Day I Hear the Noise of Water”
- Dubliners—“The Dead”
Publisher’s Description: In short stories, poems, and monumental novels, James Joyce set out to discover the meaning of his nationality, simultaneously celebrating and ridiculing the history of Ireland in the brilliant style that has made him the most towering figure in the literary landscape of the early 20th century. Dublin-born Gabriel Byrne, who has starred in 16 films, including Little Women and The Usual Suspects, clearly brings to life Joyce’s short stories from Dubliners, and selections from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Chamber Music in this audio version.
The Best of James Joyce
The Best of James Joyce
Read by Emma Hignett, Cyril Cusack, Siobhán McKenna, and E.G. Marshall
Saland, 2011
Also available as: MP3
Abridged; 1 hours, 48 minutes
This unusual collection was released by Saland Publishing, a somewhat mysterious entity with little online presence. The set combines a few of the 1959-1960 Caedmon recordings by Cyril Cusack, Siobhán McKenna, and E.G. Marshall with two stories from Saland’s 2011 abridged edition of Dubliners, read by British voiceover actress Emma Hignett. Her crisp British accent is a pleasure to hear, but her readings lack the nuance of more sensitive interpreters.
Contents:
- Excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “A great fire, banked high and red…” Read by Cyril Cusack
- Dubliners—“The Sisters,” Read by Emma Hignett
- Excerpt from Finnegans Wake— “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” Read by Siobhán McKenna
- Dubliners—“Araby,” Read by Emma Hignett
- Excerpt from Ulysses—“Soliloquy of Leopold Bloom,” Read by E.G. Marshall
The James Joyce BBC Radio Drama Collection
The James Joyce BBC Radio Drama Collection
Read by Andrew Scott, Frances Barber, Henry Goodman, Jim Norton, Niamh Cusack, Stephen Rea
BBC Digital Audio, 2019
Also available as: CD
Abridged; 13 hours, 12 minutes
This collection contains abridged versions of previously-released BBC radio dramas. The following description is from the publisher:
Ulysses
In this full-cast dramatisation of Joyce’s epic modernist novel, the stories of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom combine as they meander through Dublin in the course of one day, 16 June 1904. Andrew Scott stars as Stephen, with Henry Goodman as Bloom, Niamh Cusack as Molly Bloom and Stephen Rea as the Narrator.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
An abridged reading of James Joyce’s autobiographical masterpiece portraying the adolescence of Stephen Dedalus, who must question the culture and religion of his native land before he can break free to become an artist. Read by Andrew Scott.
Dubliners
This abridged collection of 15 naturalistic tales depicts an array of characters from childhood through adolescence to maturity. Stories of love, loss, friendship, marriage, politics and family combine to create a unified world and a celebration of a city. Read by Stephen Rea.
James Joyce—A Biography
Gordon Bowker’s comprehensive study explores Joyce’s years spent in exile in Europe and examines how his life shaped his genius. Read by Jim Norton, with Andrew Scott as the voice of Joyce.
The Ultimate James Joyce Collection
The Ultimate James Joyce Collection
Read by Stewart Crank
Museum Audiobooks, 2020
Unabridged; 53 hours, 50 minutes
Read by British voiceover artist Stewart Crank, this bundle contains Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses—apparently “ultimate” doesn’t include Finnegans Wake! Crank has a pleasant English accent, and his delivery has the flair of a storyteller—nothing is overdone, and everything feels lucid and distinct, with just the right amount of “acting.” Not bad for 1 Audible credit.
James Joyce Collection
James Joyce Collection
Read by Rory Young
Montgomery Providence Publishing, 2021
Unabridged; 43 hours, 2 minutes
This collection is read by Canadian voice actor Rory Young, and is only sold as a bundle—the three included books are not available separately. Young’s narration is pleasant enough, but his neutral, North-American accent and lackluster delivery feel more suited to a corporate video than Joyce’s multivalent prose. If you’re in the mood for a single Joyce collection, the Stewart Crank set is a better option.
Joyce Audio
[Main Page | His Own Voice | Collections | Dubliners | Portrait | Ulysses | Finnegans Wake | Drama & Poetry | Biography & Criticism | Miscellany]
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 14 June 2024
Main Joyce Page: The Brazen Head
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com