A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

by Julian Barnes

Overview

This is, in short, a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world, starting with the voyage of Noah's ark and ending with a sneak preview of heaven!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307797865
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/15/2011
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Julian Barnes is the author of more than 20 books, including Keeping an The Sense of an Ending, The Noise of Time, and Eye Open: Essays on Art. He has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in France, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina; in Austria, the State Prize for European Literature. In 2004, he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages. He lives in London.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

January 19, 1946

Place of Birth:

Leicester, England

Education:

Degree in modern languages from Magdalen College, Oxford, 1968

Table of Contents

Introduction; Text; Glossary; Activities

Editorial Reviews

Barnes is an accomplished equilibrist; a reader who appreciates being made to work for his sense of balance will find in A History of the World special pleasures, special perils.

NY Review of Books

The many stories here are given their...humor, by an undercurrent of gentle, self-reflective irony.

New York Times Books of the Century

Barnes is an accomplished equilibrist; a reader who appreciates being made to work for his sense of balance will find in A History of the World special pleasures, special perils.

New York Review of Books

Admirers of Barnes are accustomed to thoroughly unorthodox approaches to the novel, and his latest, while brilliantly entertaining, certainly strains the limits of the genre.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A revisionist view of Noah's Ark, told by the stowaway woodworm. A chilling account of terrorists hijacking a cruise ship. A court case in 16th-century France in which the woodworm stand accused. A desperate woman's attempt to escape radioactive fallout on a raft. An acute analysis of Gericault's ``Scene of Shipwreck.'' The search of a 19th-century Englishwoman and of a contemporary American astronaut for Noah's Ark. An actor's increasingly desperate letters to his silent lover. A thoughtful meditation on the novelist's responsibility regarding love. These and other stories make up Barnes's witty and sometimes acerbic retelling of the history of the world. The stories are connected, if only tangentially, which is precisely Barnes' point: historians may tell us that ``there was a pattern,'' but history is ``just voices echoing in the dark....strange links, impertinent connections.'' Fascinating reading. -- Barbara Hoffert

Library Journal

Mr. Barnes's concerns throughout are abstract and philosophical, though his tone is unpretentious....Given the principle of repetition, of permutations and combinations, it is inevitable that some of Mr. Barnes's prose pieces are more successful than others....''A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'' demystifies its subjects and renders them almost ordinary: ''Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.'' In so doing it deconstructs, perhaps even mocks, its own ambition. If the reader does not come to the book with certain of the expectations of prose fiction - that ideas will be dramatized with such narrative momentum that forgets they are ''ideas,'' and that complete worlds will be evoked by way of prose, not merely discussed - this is a playful, witty and entertaining gathering of conjectures by a man to whom ideas are quite clearly crucial: a quintessential humanist, it would seem, of the pre-post-modernist species. -- New York Times

Joyce Carol Oates

Stunning … a flawless diamond.” —Chicago Sun-Times

"Playful, witty and entertaining." —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

"Frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic and a delight to read." —Salman Rushdie, Observer

"At his best, Barnes is a dazzler." —Los Angeles Times

“It’s a book to keep the reader on his toes.” —The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher