Review
The first time I picked up a book by Julian Barnes, it was one of those magical moments in an independent bookstore... The unassuming jacket illustration caught my eye so I crossed the creaky wooden floor to explore its pages. And that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I was instantly drawn to how he illustrates the near-invisible nuances of human interaction and his keen understanding of how people communicate differently than one another. And in this collection of fourteen short stories entitled
Pulse, Julian Barnes continues to capture the subtleties of what brings us together and what keeps us isolated.
Using a close third person point-of-view, and with a quality reminiscent of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Barnes is brilliant at showing readers - through minor gestures and realistic dialogue - that his...
Beyond the Book
Julian Barnes can rightfully be called a prolific author, having published nineteen books, more than twenty short stories, and over one-hundred essays and reviews! He has also written four novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, a mysterious, steer-wrestling, gay-bar-bouncing personality who, "devoted his adolescence to truancy, venery and petty theft... [and who] is currently working in London at jobs he declines to specify". In October 2011, after having been nominated four times, Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his highly acclaimed novel,
The Sense of an Ending. Read on to learn more about a...
