Discovered after death: Anthony Burgess’s radical edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

It is one of the most challenging novels of the modernist era, but now James Joyce’s Ulysses has had a radical revision, thanks in part to a Manchester Met Professor of Modern Literature.

Anthony Burgess, the Mancunian writer, best known for writing A Clockwork Orange, was a great admirer of Joyce. After his death in 1993, the complete manuscript of A Shorter Ulysses was discovered among his unpublished papers. 

It is now being published for the first time ever, in a book compiled by Andrew Biswell, a professor in the School of English at Manchester Met and director of the Anthony Burgess Foundation. 

Professor Biswell said: “Ulysses has a distinctive linguistic richness. Joyce invented a large number of new words and new styles of narration. A Shorter Ulysses is intended as a gateway to the bigger book. I wish it had been around when I was trying to read the novel for the first time in my teens. We have tested this new version on people who didn’t know Ulysses — or who had tried and failed to read it — and they have found it really useful.

“But it’s a controversial publication. Many people will question if it is legitimate to have an ‘easier’ version, or what might seem to be a ‘dumbed-down’ version of Ulysses. But Burgess was very clear in his writings about Joyce that he thought people would need help to understand his works.”

The reduced version of Ulysses is structured around the key episodes of the novel and includes a foreword and commentary by Burgess. It also contains a long biographical introduction from Professor Biswell, who is the author’s biographer and executor.

Burgess first read Joyce’s Ulysses as a teenager and it quickly became his favourite novel. He re-read it at least once every year and went on write two critical commentaries on Joyce and a reader’s edition of A Shorter Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s final novel.

Professor Biswell said: “Burgess, as a schoolboy in Manchester, borrowed a copy of Ulysses, which was banned at that time. His history teacher had bought it in Germany and smuggled a copy back. I suppose that he was attracted by the scandalous content. But once you’ve moved beyond that, it’s also it’s stylistically very experimental and extravagant. 

“After his death, Burgess’s manuscript of A Shorter Ulysses was found in a large collection of unpublished papers, and some pages were missing. He had taken two copies of the Penguin paperback of Ulysses and disbound them, cutting and pasting sections from both books into pages of commentary written on his typewriter. Preparing the manuscript for publication, I checked each passage and each sentence for accuracy, to make sure the finished version was what Burgess and Joyce had both intended.”

As well as A Shorter Ulysses, the publication includes Blooms of Dublin, an operetta by Burgess which has been unavailable since 1985. The musical was broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and it represents another accessible adaptation of Ulysses.

“Ulysses is thought to be one of the high points of modern literature,” said Professor Biswell. “It was totally original. Before Joyce, nobody had written a novel using the stream of consciousness technique at such extravagant length.”

 A Shorter Ulysses was published by Galileo in October 2025.