Ian Geraghty's wife has given birth to a baby girl, 7lb 5 ounces, mother and nipper doing amazing. Cara Collins, plugging an article Barry Shaughnessy, plugging a gig. When she takes us into the 'fat blue stream' of Elizabeth's Twitter feed – 'Ger McKay is linking to something in the Guardian again. 'Counterparts', of course, refers to a duplicate copy, but McKeon's version mines the word by both copying and running counter to Joyce's original. In both stories, an ill-considered remark has job‑threatening consequences, but whereas Farrington fails to complete his work owing to his need for alcohol, Elizabeth's problem is her obsessive checking of Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and '17 open Safari tabs'. Belinda McKeon transforms the central character of 'Counterparts', the dipsomaniacal scrivener Farrington, into Elizabeth, an expat Dubliner working as an intern in New York. Mary Morrissy's 'An Encounter' is more oblique, knowingly playing on readers' fears that the man who confronts two young girls in the woods will be the masturbating paedophile of Joyce's original. John Kelly's 'A Little Cloud' is like Sid Vicious's take on 'My Way': instantly recognisable as the same song, but louder and brasher. The results are predictably mixed, but the successes are notable. The description is a useful one, giving each writer the freedom to stay as close or wander as far from the language, atmosphere and incident of the original as they wish. In his introduction, Morris describes the process less as rewriting, more like covering a song. In Dubliners 100, Thomas Morris, editor of Irish literary magazine Stinging Fly, has challenged 15 Irish writers to respond to Dubliners.

For this reason, the emotional and intellectual truths of the book glint as brightly today as they did 100 years ago. They are tied to a specific time and place, but, as with the famous snowfall at the close of the book's final story, 'The Dead', which moves from one Dublin street to all of Ireland, and then the entire universe, Joyce's specificity proves encompassing. The stories, sharply ironic, beautiful, despairing and mysterious, work on different levels, and develop a rich interplay of hidden allusion and resonance. Each of its 15 stories can stand alone, but together they cohere into what Joyce called 'a chapter of the moral history of my country'. It has been described as an example of 'embryonic modernism', and among short story collections it occupies a justifiably vaunted position. Long overshadowed by Ulysses, that high peak of modernism, and Finnegans Wake, which pushes the novel to extremes, Dubliners has gradually established a proximate if not equal standing.

Dubliners book