Julian Barnes Remembers John Updike

Julian Barnes writes about reading the Rabbit Tetralogy during a three-week book tour in America. Read the full post on The New Yorker website's "Remembering John Updike".

Excerpt: "Like many others, I've regularly taken Ruskin's The Stones of Venice with me to Venice, and regularly failed to read a word of it there. That reader's hoped-for matching of text to place frequently disappoints. But once, a dozen or so years ago, it worked miraculously for me. I was setting out on a three-week book tour, crisscrossing America. At Heathrow I bought Rabbit, Run and started it on the plane. All reading problems became reading joys for the entire trip."

Conversations with Julian Barnes (Pre-Order)

The University Press of Mississippi has announced the upcoming publication of Conversations with Julian Barnes edited by Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts. Publication is scheduled for April 2009, and you may pre-order a copy at the University Press of Mississippi website or online via Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, or a variety of Independent Booksellers.
About the Book:
Conversations with Julian Barnes collects eighteen interviews, conducted over nearly three decades, by journalists and correspondents throughout the world with the author (b. 1946) of such highly praised novels as Flaubert's Parrot and Arthur & George. The interviews collectively address the entirety of Julian Barnes's varied works and provide readers the most vivid portrait yet of contexts and influences behind his ten novels, his short stories, and his essays. The interviews focus not only on the author's fiction but also on his essays, translations, and pseudonymous writings. Barnes's evolving understanding of the themes developed in his works (history, truth, love, art, and death), his views on the art of the writing process, and the role of authors in contemporary society are also discussed at length.
About the Editors:
Vanessa Guignery is assistant professor of British literature at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne and the author of The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Ryan Roberts is a librarian at Lincoln Land Community College. He also maintains the official websites of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan.