Book description
In these seventeen essays (and one short story) the 2011 Man Booker
Prize winner examines British, French and American writers who have
meant most to him, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of
their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope
Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of
France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of
Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the
National Treasure Status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel
Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can
do. As he writes in his preface, 'Novels tell us the most truth about
life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy
and value it, and how we lose it.'
When his Letters from London came out in 1995, the
Financial Times called him 'our best essayist'. This wise and
deft collection confirms that judgment.
Julian Barnes is the author of eleven novels, including
Metroland
,
Flaubert's Parrot
,
Arthur &
George
and most recently
The Sense of an Ending
, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He has also written
three books of short stories,
Cross Channel
,
The Lemon Table
and
Pulse
; and three collections of journalism,
Letters from London
,
Something to Declare
and
The Pedant in the Kitchen
. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. In France
he is the only British writer to have won both the Prix Médicis (for
Flaubert's Parrot
) and the Prix Femina (for
Talking it Over
). In 2004 he received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature,
and in 2011 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He
lives in London.
