{"product_id":"the-lemon-table-isbn-9781400076505","title":"The Lemon Table","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn this widely acclaimed collection of short stories, the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of \u003ci\u003eThe Sense of an Ending\u003c\/i\u003e addresses the most poignant aspect of the human condition: growing old. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"A master at work…. Sweet, sour, bitter, wistful, ruminative, comic, elegiac … A joy to read.\" —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe characters in \u003ci\u003eThe Lemon Table\u003c\/i\u003e are facing the ends of their lives—some with bitter regret, others with resignation, and others still with defiant rage. Their circumstances are just as varied as their responses. In 19th-century Sweden, three brief conversations provide the basis for a lifetime of longing. In today’s England, a retired army major heads into the city for his regimental dinner—and his annual appointment with a professional lady named Babs. Somewhere nearby, a devoted wife calms (or perhaps torments) her ailing husband by reading him recipes. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn stories brimming with life and our desire to hang on to it one way or another, Barnes proves himself by turns wise, funny, clever, and profound—a writer of astonishing powers of empathy and invention.\"A master at work, a writer in absolute control of his material. . . . Sweet, sour,  bitter, wistful, ruminative, comic, elegiac—\u003ci\u003eThe Lemon Table\u003c\/i\u003e is . . . a joy to read.\" —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Beautifully wrought elegies for lost youth, lost promises  and lost loves [that] attest to Mr. Barnes's growing depth as a writer, his newly  embraced ability to create stories that are as affecting as they are cunning, as  emotionally resonant as they are prettily fashioned.\" —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Filled with  emotional resonance and hard-won wisdom, \u003ci\u003eThe Lemon Table\u003c\/i\u003e is a virtuoso performance  of remarkable clarity and insight.\" —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Mr. Barnes handles  his somber material with compassion, verve, shrewd intelligence and a sharp sense  of irony. . . . Reading [these stories] is an experience more enlivening than depressing,  [even as] mortality itself is ever present and truthfully confronted. —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street  Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Barnes is a top-flight precisionist, [with] the steady, pleasing wit of  English comic realism, in which sheer intelligence and acute observation carry the  whole production, line after line, page after page . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Lemon Table\u003c\/i\u003e, in ways  both modest and grand, helps sustain a reader's faith in literature as the truest  form of assisted living.\" —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"These gracefully constructed  stories are subtle, erudite, and wise; they elevate us because there are few such  generous observers of humanity. In a word: \u003ci\u003eThe Lemon Table\u003c\/i\u003e is Barnes at his profound,  dexterous best.\" —\u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"[Julian Barnes is] one of the most gifted contemporary  shapers of prose, possessed of a remarkable limberness of form and voice, and an  unconstrained literary imagination.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"The stories in \u003ci\u003eThe Lemon  Table\u003c\/i\u003e are quite old-fashioned–in the best sense of the word. They remind one of the  deceptive simplicity of the stories of Chekhov or that prodigy of the absurd, Nikolai  Gogol. With their underlying classicism, their commitment to truth and beauty, Barnes's  stories also harken back to a pre-existential time in which hope was still, in a  tragic sort of way, possible.\" —\u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Barnes can telescope the whole world  through a single lens . . . Each story unfolds with masterly speed, diving quickly  to the heart of the matter.\" —\u003ci\u003eLouisville Courier-Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Remarkable meditations  on loneliness and aging.” —\u003ci\u003eSt. Petersburg Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Julian Barnes has many interests  [and] a variety of talents that enable him to manage them all . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Lemon Table\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eleaves one in no doubt as to Barnes's virtuosity.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"[A] brave, well-crafted  book . . . Barnes describes the realities of aging with precision and a knack for  matching narrative device to psychological reality.\" —\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"'Were you as young  as you felt, or as old as you looked?' This is the conundrum at the heart of \u003ci\u003eThe  Lemon Table, \u003c\/i\u003e[with] assorted pensioners, catty widows, randy old army majors, and  noise-sensitive concertgoers forcefully exercising their right not to go gently into  that good night.\" —\u003ci\u003eVogue\u003c\/i\u003eBorn in Leicester, England, in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of a previous book of stories, \u003cb\u003eCross Channel\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e,\u003c\/i\u003e two collections of essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet’s \u003cb\u003eIn the Land of Pain\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e,\u003c\/i\u003e and nine novels. In France, he is the only writer to have won both the Prix M?dicis and the Prix F?mina, and in 2004 he became a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; in England his honors include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He has also received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.\u003cbr\u003ewww.julianbarnes.com\u003cb\u003eA Short History of Hairdressing\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat first time, after they moved, his mother had come with him. Presumably to examine the barber. As if the phrase “short back and sides, with a little bit off the top” might mean something different in this new suburb. He’d doubted it. Everything else seemed the same: the torture chair, the surgical smells, the strop and the folded razor — folded not in safety but in threat. Most of all, the torturer-in-chief was the same, a loony with big hands who pushed your head down till your windpipe nearly snapped, who prodded your ear with a bamboo finger. “General inspection, madam?” he said greasily when he’d finished. His mother had shaken off the effects of her magazine and stood up. “Very nice,” she said vaguely, leaning over him, smelling of stuff. “I’ll send him by himself next time.” Outside, she had rubbed his cheek, looked at him with idle eyes, and murmured, “You poor shorn lamb.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow he was on his own. As he walked past the estate agent’s, the sports shop and the half-timbered bank, he practised saying, “Short back and sides with a little bit off the top.” He said it urgently, without the comma; you had to get the words just right, like a prayer. There was one and threepence in his pocket; he stuffed his handkerchief in tighter to keep the coins safe. He didn’t like not being allowed to be afraid. It was simpler at the dentist’s: your mother always came with you, the dentist always hurt you, but afterwards he gave you a boiled sweet for being a good boy, and then back in the waiting room you pretended in front of the other patients that you were made of stern stuff. Your parents were proud of you. “Been in the wars, old chap?” his father would ask. Pain let you into the world of grown-up phrases. The dentist would say, “Tell your father you’re fit for overseas. He’ll understand.” So he’d go home and Dad would say, “Been in the wars, old chap?” and he’d answer, “Mr. Gordon says I’m fit for overseas.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe felt almost important going in, with the adult spring of the door against his hand. But the barber merely nodded, pointed with his comb to the line of high-backed chairs, and resumed his standing crouch over a white-haired geezer. Gregory sat down. His chair creaked. Already he wanted to pee. There was a bin of magazines next to him, which he didn’t dare explore. He gazed at the hamster nests of hair on the floor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen his turn came, the barber slipped a thick rubber cushion onto the seat. The gesture looked insulting: he’d been in long trousers now for ten and a half months. But that was typical: you were never sure of the rules, never sure if they tortured everyone the same way, or if it was just you. Like now: the barber was trying to strangle him with the sheet, pulling it tight round his neck, then shoving a cloth down inside his collar. “And what can we do for you today, young man?” The tone implied that such an ignominious and deceitful woodlouse as he obviously was might have strayed into the premises for any number of different reasons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter a pause, Gregory said, “I’d like a haircut, please.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Well, I’d say you’d come to the right place, wouldn’t you?” The barber tapped him on the crown with his comb; not painfully, but not lightly either.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Short-back-and-sides-with-a-little-bit-off-the-top-please.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Now we’re motoring,” said the barber.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey would only do boys at certain times of the week. There was a notice saying No Boys on Saturday Mornings. Saturday afternoons they were closed anyway, so it might just as well read No Boys on Saturdays. Boys had to go when men didn’t want to. At least, not men with jobs. He went at times when the other customers were pensioners. There were three barbers, all of middle age, in white coats, dividing their time between the young and the old. They greased up to these throat-clearing old geezers, made mysterious conversation with them, put on a show of being keen on their trade. The old geezers wore coats and scarves even in summer, and gave tips as they left. Gregory would watch the transaction out of the corner of his eye. One man giving another man money, a secret half-handshake with both pretending the exchange wasn’t being made.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBoys didn’t tip. Perhaps that was why barbers hated boys. They paid less and they didn’t tip. They also didn’t keep still. Or at least, their mothers told them to keep still, they kept still, but this didn’t stop the barber bashing their heads with a palm as solid as the flat of a hatchet and muttering, “Keep still.” There were stories of boys who’d had the tops of their ears sliced off because they hadn’t kept still. Razors were called cut-throats. All barbers were loonies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wolf cub, are we?” It took Gregory a while to realize that he was being addressed. Then he didn’t know whether to keep his head down or look up in the mirror at the barber. Eventually he kept his head down and said, “No.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Boy scout already?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Crusader?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGregory didn’t know what that meant. He started to lift his head, but the barber rapped his crown with the comb. “Keep \u003ci\u003estill\u003c\/i\u003e, I said.” Gregory was so scared of the loony that he was unable to answer, which the barber took as a negative. “Very fine organization, the Crusaders. You give it a thought.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGregory thought of being chopped up by curved Saracen swords, of being staked out in the desert and eaten alive by ants and vultures. Meanwhile, he submitted to the cold smoothness of the scissors — always cold even when they weren’t. Eyes tight shut, he endured the tickly torment of hair falling on his face. He sat there, still not looking, convinced that the barber should have stopped cutting ages ago, except that he was such a loony he would probably carry on cutting and cutting until Gregory was bald. Still to come was the stropping of the razor, which meant that your throat was going to be cut; the dry, scrapy feel of the blade next to your ears and on the back of your neck; the fly-whisk shoved into your eyes and nose to get the hair out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThose were the bits that made you wince every time. But there was also something creepier about the place. He suspected it was rude. Things you didn’t know about, or weren’t meant to know about, usually turned out to be rude. Like the barber’s pole. That was obviously rude. The previous place just had an old bit of painted wood with colours twirling round it. The one here worked by electricity, and moved in whirly circles all the time. That was ruder, he thought. Then there was the binful of magazines. He was sure some of them were rude. Everything was rude if you wanted it to be. This was the great truth about life which he’d only just discovered. Not that he minded. Gregory liked rude things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWithout moving his head, he looked in the next-door mirror at a pensioner two seats away. He’d been yakking on in the sort of loud voice old geezers always had. Now the barber was bent over him with a small pair of round-headed scissors, cutting hairs out of his eyebrows. Then he did the same with his nostrils; then his ears. Snipping great twigs out of his lugholes. Absolutely disgusting. Finally, the barber started brushing powder into the back of the geezer’s neck. What was that for?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow the torturer-in-chief had the clippers out. That was another bit Gregory didn’t like. Sometimes they used hand-clippers, like tin-openers, squeak grind squeak grind round the top of his skull till his brains were opened up. But these were the buzzer-clippers, which were even worse, because you could get electrocuted from them. He’d imagined it hundreds of times. The barber buzzes away, doesn’t notice what he’s doing, hates you anyway because you’re a boy, cuts a wodge off your ear, the blood pours all over the clippers, they get a short-circuit and you’re electrocuted on the spot. Must have happened millions of times. And the barber always survived because he wore rubber-soled shoes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt school they swam naked. Mr. Lofthouse wore a pouch-thing so they couldn’t see his whanger. The boys took off all their clothes, had a shower for lice or verrucas or something, or being smelly in the case of Wood, then jumped into the pool. You leaped up high and landed with the water hitting your balls. That was rude, so you didn’t let the master see you doing it. The water made your balls all tight, which made your willy stick out more, and afterwards they towelled themselves dry and looked at one another without looking, sort of sideways, like in the mirror at the barber’s. Everyone in the class was the same age, but some were still bald down there; some, like Gregory, had a sort of bar of hair across the top but nothing on their balls; and some, like Hopkinson and Shapiro, were as hairy as men already, and a darker colour, brownish, like Dad’s when he’d peeped round the side of a stand-up. At least he had \u003ci\u003esome\u003c\/i\u003e hair, not like Baldy Bristowe and Hall and Wood. But how did Hopkinson and Shapiro get like that? Everyone else had willies; Hopkinson and Shapiro already had whangers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe wanted to pee. He couldn’t. He mustn’t think about peeing. He could hold out till he got home. The Crusaders fought the Saracens and delivered the Holy Land from the Infidel. Like Infidel Castro, sir? That was one of Wood’s jokes. They wore crosses on their surcoats. Chainmail must have been hot in Israel. He must stop thinking that he could win a gold medal in a peeing-high-against-a-wall competition.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Local?” said the barber suddenly. Gregory looked at him in the mirror for the first proper time. Red face, little moustache, glasses, yellowy hair the colour of a school ruler. \u003ci\u003eQuis custodiet ipsos custodes\u003c\/i\u003e, they’d been taught. So who barbers barbers? You could tell this one was a perve as well as a loony. Everyone knew there were millions of perves out there. The swimming master was a perve. After the lesson, when they were shivering in their towels with their balls all tight and their willies plus two whangers sticking out, Mr. Lofthouse would walk the length of the poolside, climb on to the springboard, pause till he had their full attention, with his huge muscles and tattoo and arms out and pouch with strings round his buttocks, then take a deep breath, dive in and glide underwater the length of the pool. Twenty-five yards underwater. Then he’d touch and surface and they’d all applaud — not that they really meant it — but he’d ignore them and practise different strokes. He was a perve. Most of the masters were probably perves. There was one who wore a wedding-ring. That proved he was.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so was this one. “Do you live locally?” he was saying again. Gregory wasn’t falling for that. He’d be coming round to sign him up for the Scouts or the Crusaders. Then he’d be asking Mum if he could take Gregory camping in the woods — except there’d only be one tent, and he’d tell Gregory stories about bears, and even though they’d done geography and he knew bears died out in Britain at about the time of the Crusades, he’d half-believe it if the perve told him there was a bear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Not for long,” Gregory replied. That wasn’t too clever, he knew at once. They’d only just moved here. The barber would say sneery things to him when he kept on coming in, for years and years and years. Gregory flicked a glance up at the mirror, but the perve wasn’t giving anything away. He was doing an absent-minded last snip. Then he dug into Gregory’s collar and shook it to make sure as much hair as possible fell down inside his shirt. “Think about the Crusaders,” he said, as he started pulling out the sheet. “It might suit you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGregory saw himself reborn from beneath the shroud, unchanged except that his ears now stuck out more. He started to slide forward on the rubber cushion. The comb snapped against his crown, harder now that he had less hair.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Not so fast, young fellow-me-lad.” The barber ambled down the length of the narrow shop and came back with an oval mirror like a tray. He dipped it to show the back of Gregory’s head. Gregory looked into the first mirror, into the second mirror, and out the other side. That wasn’t the back of his head. It didn’t look like that. He felt himself blush. He wanted to pee. The perve was showing him the back of someone else’s head. Black magic. Gregory stared and stared, his colour getting brighter, staring at the back of someone else’s head, all shaved and sculpted, until he realized that the only way to get home was to play the perve’s game, so he took a final glance at the alien skull, looked boldly higher up the mirror at the barber’s indifferent spectacles, and said, quietly, “Yes.”A Novel","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301051322597,"sku":"NP9781400076505","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400076505.jpg?v=1767740210","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-lemon-table-isbn-9781400076505","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}