Barring the occasional lovely turn of phrase (which foreshadows the later brilliance of [b:Ulysses|338798|Ulysses|James Joyce|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173877044s/338798.jpg|2368224]), and the wonderfully evocative sense of a particular time and place, I thought these stories were uniformly dull. The common thread seemed to be failure, with character after character falling short of achieving their dreams. The only one I came close to liking was "The Dead".

After reading its Wikipedia page, I've concluded that this is an objectively good collection from a literary standpoint, but I lack the context to fully appreciate it.