Even before its first publication in 1922, Ulysses dominated the literary landscape. It has generated diverse and animated responses from readers and critics alike, eliciting superlatives both positive and negative. Encompassing everything human – urination, defecation, masturbation, crepitation, menstruation, fornication, insemination, paturition and expiration – it entered the world as at once the most obscene and the most brilliant of novels wherein Joyce strove to answer the question that bedeviled him: Is life worth living? To this end Joyce immersed himself in the Dublin of 1904, in a ludic procession of minor characters, and in his cast of principal players – the artist (Stephen Dedalus), the man in the street (Leopold Bloom) and the woman who said yes (Molly Bloom) – fashioning a sustained, unparalleled tour-de-force of writerly genius.

As a text, Ulysses is locked inside a series of boxes, the brazen keys to which are closely guarded by zealots passionate in their custodianship. In his internationally debated, best-selling, prosecuted and now banned Reader’s Edition, Danis Rose sought to overcome the limitations imposed on the capacity of the ‘text’ to continue to be meaningful, critically, creatively and culturally. In response, the custodians saw to it that his edition was suppressed. In counter-response, with the New Reader’s Edition, Rose demonstrates the continuing creativity of the model he championed, as Ulysses reappears, renewed!