Julian Barnes is one of the most celebrated and most variously rewarding of Britain's younger writers--that is, those who were born in the late 1940s and began publishing in the late 1970s or the 1980...
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In the following review, Gosswiller asserts that the style of Barnes's The Porcupine is different from his earlier novels due to its subject matter.
A truly powerful short novel is a rare event...
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Scammell is a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University. In the following review, he complains that Barnes loses control of the narrative in The Porcupine.
In the twelve years since he gav...
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In the following review, Marien discusses the virtues and faults of Barnes's The Porcupine.
“Do you think a whole country can get therapy?” That question is at the core of British...
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In the following review, Byrne praises Barnes's mixing of politics and fiction in The Porcupine.
The jury is still out, one might think, on the subject of whether a good defense is the best off...
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In the following review, Furbank calls Cross Channel “perhaps Barnes's most assured work so far.”
It was Wittgenstein's objection to Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams ...
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In the following review, Eder lauds the stories in Barnes's Cross Channel.
In the 1860s, a bourgeois family takes a Sunday excursion out of Rouen to gawk at an encampment of British laborers en...
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In the following essay, Birkerts provides an overview of Barnes's career and major works.
Julian Barnes once remarked—or, better, proclaimed—that “in order to write, you ha...
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In the following excerpt, Filbin calls Barnes's Cross Channel “charming, brilliant, and sui generis.”
While first novels often burst with literary energy and the raw emotion franc...
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In the following essay, Higdon analyzes some of the contributions to fictional structure made by Julian Barnes and Graham Swift.
Who will be for the British novel of the 1980s what John Fowles and Mar...
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In the following essay, Millington and Sinclair trace the use of the cuckold in literature, citing several examples including Graham from Barnes's Before She Met Me.
A large number of works of ...
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In the following review, Wheeler lauds Barnes's Talking It Over.
Julian Barnes is an extraordinary writer. In this novel [Talking It Over,] he takes an old love story, the triangle that leads f...
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In the following excerpt, Flower praises Barnes's Talking It Over, stating, “Few novels seem as authentic and lifelike as this one.”
Fiction, especially modern fiction, licenses a...
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In the following review, Duplain lauds Barnes's The Porcupine as “a satisfyingly balanced book.”
When the party has fallen, the economy is in ruins, the atmosphere choked with pol...
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In the following review, the critic complains that Barnes's The Porcupine “lacks warmth or, in the end, any particular moral force.”
The so-called “literary novel” i...
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For years, Julian Barnes has been not quite Nabokov or W.G. Sebald. Not quite there yet? Or not quite Julian Barnes? He’s been funny, chilled, sparkish, a dandyish surveyor of fiction and its...
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For years, Julian Barnes has been not quite Nabokov or W.G. Sebald. Not quite there yet? Or not quite Julian Barnes? He’s been funny, chilled, sparkish, a dandyish surveyor of fiction and its...
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Theatrical and literary agents are taking leading roles in a corporate drama in London, resigning one after another from a major agency and threatening to take their clients with them.The exodus fr...
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Dana Vachon, the 28-year-old banker turned blogger turned novelist about town, was not wearing socks. Just loafers. A buttery brown leather pair that may or may not have been Gucci and cocooned his...
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On Jan. 31, 2005, the BBC made it official: On the evening news, the anchor gravely announced the publication of Ian McEwan's new novel, Saturday, and proclaimed the author "the international voice...
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Back when summer actually meant a few months of relaxing and down time to New Yorkers, one of the most treasured rituals was the weekly trip to the neighborhood bookstore, to choose a new book (or ...
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Back when summer actually meant a few months of relaxing and down time to New Yorkers, one of the most treasured rituals was the weekly trip to the neighborhood bookstore, to choose a new book (or ...
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