Who wrote the short story collection Dubliners?

James Joyce, and getting it printed took nine years and defeated several publishers. One Dublin printer set the type and then burned the sheets rather than risk prosecution over passages naming real businesses and using the word bloody. Joyce wrote a furious open letter about it and eventually published in London in 1914.

The stories are built around a technique he named the epiphany - an ordinary moment in which something is suddenly and quietly understood, usually by someone who cannot do anything about it. Almost nothing happens in most of them, and the effect depends on that: paralysis was his word for what he thought was wrong with Dublin, and every story is somebody failing to leave, act or speak.

The last, The Dead, is regularly called the best short story in English, and it turns on a husband learning at the end of an ordinary evening that his wife has been thinking all night about a boy who died for love of her at seventeen. Joyce spent almost his entire adult life outside Ireland - Trieste, Zurich, Paris - and wrote about nowhere else, saying that if he could get to the heart of Dublin he could get to the heart of all the cities of the world.