After the best-selling Arthur & George and Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes returns with fourteen stories about longing and loss, friendship and love, whose mysterious natures he examines with his trademark wit and observant eye.
From an imperial capital in the eighteenth century to Garibaldi's adventures in the nineteenth, from the vineyards of Italy to the English seaside in our time, he finds the "stages, transitions, arguments" that define us. A newly divorced real estate agent can't resist invading his reticent girlfriend's privacy, but the information he finds reveals only his callously shallow curiosity. A couple come together through an illicit cigarette and a song shared over the din of a Chinese restaurant. A widower revisiting the Scottish island he'd treasured with his wife learns how difficult it is to purge oneself of grief. And throughout, friends gather regularly at dinner parties and perfect the art of cerebral, sometimes bawdy banter about the world passing before them.
Whether domestic or extraordinary, each story pulses with the resonance, spark, and poignant humor for which Barnes is justly heralded.
The first time I picked up a book by Julian Barnes, it was one of those magical moments in a little 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. (Reviewed by Elena Spagnolie).
Jill Owens, The Oregonian
Marvelously inventive... Pulse sneaks up on you, and by the end, you cannot help but be moved. These are stories that illuminate characters not through dramatic epiphanies but real, small turns in the road and moments of change. [Barnes's] prose is rich without being showy; he has a precision and economy of language that at times recalls William Trevor. Above all, Pulse shows a contemporary master working at the height of his ability.
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Filled with gems... beautiful, elegiac tales about how marriages endure or change over time... A testament to Mr. Barnes's full panoply of talents... [He's a] confident literary decathlete, proficient at old-fashioned storytelling, dialogue-driven portraiture, postmodern collage, political allegory and farce, [and the] ability to create narratives with both surface brio and finely calibrated philosophical subtexts.
Library Journal
This is a simply delicious collection that anyone who loves good fiction should read.
Booklist
In his third collection [of short stories], his gift for deft, acerbic dialogue is finely honed, most enjoyably in a quartet of dinner-party stories.... Barnes's tales are shrewd, piquant, and moving.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Elegance and versatility - those familiar Barnes strengths define this latest story collection from the distinguished British author.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Companionship - the search for, the basking in, and the loss of - binds Barnes's first-rate collection of short stories, his first since 2004's The Lemon Table.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Jeff Fell It helps me I am currently using your book as therapy for the damage done to my brain by another book. I happened upon a new paperback, I bought it while on holiday in Cambodia and I wish I had used the money for dental surgery as it would have been less... Read More
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 selection of his novels...
The first book he published under the name Julian Barnes,...
Explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.
These are 2 of the 6 readalike suggestions for Pulse. Members have full access to all readalikes. If you are a member, please login. To find out more about membership, click here.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
Full Story
BookBrowse
(975 words).
of 5
by Jeff Fell
Write your own review!
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 selection of his novels...
The first book he published under the name Julian Barnes,...
