Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. The stories were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of the Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories center on Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character has a special moment of self-understanding or illumination. The initial stories in the collection are narrated by children as protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce's division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, and maturity. Source: http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubliners