During 2024, James Joyce's Ulysses was the 1,000 book released by Standard Ebooks, which puts out carefully edited versions of the classics; it's my go-to source for public domain books. (I'm currently reading the Standard Ebooks version of Moby Dick; I can use my Kindle to make the type large enough for my old eyes to read easily. The type in my paperback copy turned out to be rather small).
Standard Ebooks has just published an essay discussing how Ulysses references another famous book, the Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (e.g., "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou"). Molly Bloom's famous "yes" at the beginning and end of the final section may have come from the poem, and the loaf and the jug are referenced in the section in which Stephen Dedalus goes to visit a brothel.
Books published in 1929 will go into the public domain on Jan. 1 in the U.S., and the Standard Ebooks folks already have announced some of the books they are working to publish soon. They include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck, Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge and Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis. (I'm a huge Sinclair Lewis fan, and Robert Anton Wilson apparently read a lot of Lewis when he was a teenager.)
At present, Standard Ebooks offers two books by Ernest Hemingway (including The Sun Also Rises), five books by James Joyce, four books by Sinclair Lewis and one by William Faulkner.
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