Through the Window Seventeen Essays and a Short Story [Paperback]

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author ofThe Sense of an Endingand one of Britain’s greatest writers: a brilliant collection of essays on the books and authors that have meant the most to him throughout his illustrious career.
 
In these seventeen essays (plus a short story and a special preface, “A Life with Books”), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, 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 ofMadame Bovaryto 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, “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.”Preface

The Deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald
The ‘Unpoetical’ Clough
George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant
Ford’s The Good Soldier
Ford and Provence
Ford’s Anglican Saint
Kipling’s France
France’s Kipling
The Wisdom of Chamfort
The Man Who Saved Old France
The Profile of Félix Fénéon
Michel Houellebecq and the Sin of Despair
Translating Madame Bovary
Wharton’s The Reef
Homage to Hemingway: a Short Story
Lorrie Moore Takes Wing
Remembering Updike, Remembering Rabbit
Regulating Sorrow

Acknowledgements
Index
A reasoned defense of great writers and great literature. . . . The criticism of a writer like Barnes deserves to be celebrated for its prose at the same time as its intelligence—criticism that functions as its own literary property. —SanlÂ