leer en español      Some writers are born before their time. Others when the time has passed. Timing is everything.James Joyce’s Ulysses was partially serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920. London publishers didn’t consider the work quite good enough to be included in their lists and the manuscript finally found its way into a limited edition in Paris with financial support from friends and the American-born publisher Sylvia Beach. It rolled off the press on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, and is considered one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century.On my bookshelf there is a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. After receiving a string of polite rejections for his picaresque novel – the politeness makes it worse, a cloud of depression darkened his mind in and in 1969, at the age of 31, he committed suicide. Toole’s mother, Thelma, salvaged the carbon copy of the manuscript and spent eleven years...