Julian Barnes has been a favorite author of mine since I borrowed stole Metroland from my friend Mark last winter. Reading Barnes makes me wish I knew some French, since he drops sentences, phrases, and occasionally passages of it, sans translation, into everything he writes, or at least everything of his that I’ve read. But I muddle through with an incomplete, partial, or guessed understanding and still find myself drawn into the stories and entranced by his command of (English) language. I'm nearly finished with Flaubert's Parrot, and being the type of person who compulsively reads Wikipedia entries, today I browsed to his, which in turn led me to his website.
There is nothing particularly special about the website, except that there happens to be a weeklong giveaway of signed copies of his brand new short story collection, Pulse, going on. I entered. It's easy. Too easy?