Setting Of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ Is Being Turned Into A Hostel, Sending Literary Folk Into A Tizzy

The unassuming 18th-century townhouse at 15 Usher’s Island is where Joyce’s great-aunts ran a music school, and their annual Epiphany dinner was the model for the gathering in the final story of Dubliners. Two Irish investors who bought the house for €650,000 (cheap by current Dublin standards) have gotten permits to convert the four-story building into a 56-bed tourist hostel — and outraged writers from Edna O’Brien and John Banville in Ireland to Rachel Kushner and Salman Rushdie abroad have signed an angry petition put together by Colm Tóibín. – The New York Times