# Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book

An episode of [The LRB Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/510327102), 24 Oct 2026, 54 min.

Audio: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/LRB8402459238.mp3

Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue: it’s exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax.’ In this episode, Toms McCarthy and Jones discuss all that and more, including why Ulysses is both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/closereadingsmbtc For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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