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FURTHER READING
Poems by James Joyce
Ulysses [excerpt]
A Memory Of the Players In a Mirror at Midnight
Ecce Puer
Flood
I Hear an Army
Song
The Dead [excerpt]
Related Prose
Letter to Alice Nelson-Dunbar
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Letter to Gertrude Chataway
by Lewis Carroll
Letter to Martha Blount
by Alexander Pope
Letter to W. B. Yeats
by Maud Gonne
Selected Love Letters to Fanny Brawne
by John Keats
Selected Love Letters to Frieda Weekley
by D. H. Lawrence
Dear Dainty Delicious Darling: Poets' Love Letters
Letter to Constance Wilcock
by Charles Olson
Letter to Peter Doyle
by Walt Whitman
Letter to Susan Huntington Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson
Two Love Notes to Alice B. Toklas
by Gertrude Stein
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Letter to Nora Barnacle [excerpt]

 
by James Joyce

Dublin, December 2, 1909

To Nora

[...]

Get ready. Put some warm-brown-linoleum on the kitchen and hang a pair of red common curtains on the windows at night. Get some kind of a cheap common comfortable armchair for your lazy lover. Do this above all, darling, as I shall not quit that kitchen for a whole week after I arrive, reading, lolling, smoking, and watching you get ready the meals and talking, talking, talking, talking to you. O how supremely happy I shall be! God in heaven, I shall be happy there! I figlioli, il fuoco, una buona mangiata, un caffè nero, un Brasil (charuto), il Piccolo della Sera, e Nora, Nora mia, Norina, Noretta, Noruccia ecc ecc...

Eva and Eileen must sleep together. Get some place for Georgie. I wish Nora and I had two beds for night-work. I am keeping and shall keep my promise, love. Time fly on quickly! I want to go back to my love, my life, my star, my little strange-eyed Ireland!

A hundred thousand kisses, darling!

JIM



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From Letters of James Joyce, vol. 2 (Faber & Faber, 1966).
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