Tapestry | Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes
Homage to Hemingway
They sat informally around a stripped-pine kitchen table. Behind him was a matching dresser, opposite him a picture window, through which he could see a cluster of damp sheep, then some rising pastureland that disappeared into low cloud.
Harmony
They had dined well at no. 261 Landstrasse, and now passed eagerly into the music room. M—’s intimates had sometimes been fortunate enough to have Gluck, Haydn or the young prodigy Mozart perform for them.
Dragons
Pierre Chaigne, carpenter, widower, was making a lantern. Standing with his back to the door of his workshed, he eased the four oblongs of glass into the runners he had cut and greased with mutton fat.
Emma Bovary's Eyes
When I was a hiccupping boy, my mother would fetch the back-door key, pull my collar away from my neck, and slip the cold metal down my back.
Complicity
When I was a hiccupping boy, my mother would fetch the back-door key, pull my collar away from my neck, and slip the cold metal down my back. At the time, I took this to be a normal medical—or maternal—procedure.
Trespass
When he and Cath broke up, he thought about joining the Ramblers, but it seemed too obviously sad a thing to do. He could imagine the conversation...
The Limner
Mr. Tuttle had been argumentative from the beginning: about the fee—twelve dollars—the size of the canvas, and the prospect to be shown through the window. Fortunately, there had been swift accord about the pose and the costume.
60/40
It was the week Hillary Clinton finally conceded. The table was a clutter of bottles and glasses; and though hunger had been satisfied, some mild social addiction kept making hands reach out to snaffle another grape, crumble a landslip from the cliff face of cheese or pick a chocolate from the box.
East Wind
The previous November, a row of wooden beach huts, their paintwork lifted and flaked by the hard east wind, had burned to the ground.
The Silence
One feeling at least grows stronger in me with each year that passes—a longing to see the cranes. At this time of the year I stand on the hill and watch the sky.
The Story of Mats Israelson
Short story about an unconsummated love affair...The story begins in a small Swedish town, describing the six horse stalls in front of the church that are accorded, as a symbol of status, to those who are leaders of the town's civic life.
Hygiene
Short story about the visit of a married British military man to London for a regimental dinner, and his thoughts as he anticipates his yearly visit to a now-elderly prostitute named Babs, whom he has been a customer of for twenty-two or twenty-three years...
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