More than settings, cities are characters in skilled writers’ hands

My June 15, 2021 book culture column for the San Francisco Chronicle:

It is often said the city in which a book is placed is its own character. ¶ James Joyce once claimed that if Dublin “suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it could be reconstructed from my book.” He’s speaking, of course, of “Ulysses,” which chronicles the wanderings of Leopold Bloom throughout that city.

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