A dazzling new collection of short stories from the international phenomenon, Haruki Murakami
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown
Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him
suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the
Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following
year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood,
published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a
phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many
languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to
Murakami's unique and addictive fictional universe.
Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a
day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance
running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and
races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records
and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I
Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and
they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing
quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of
imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious
and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant
readers, ensuring Murakami's place as one of the world's most
acclaimed and well-loved writers.
Supremely enjoyable, philosophical and pitch-perfect new collection
of short stories. . . Murakami has a marvellous understanding of
youth and age - and the failings of each
*Observer*
Murakami writes of complex things with his usual beguiling
simplicity. . . Strangely invigorating to read. . . It is Murakami
at his whimsical, romantic best
*Financial Times*
Calculatedly provocative. . ., the stories offer sweet-sour
meditations on human solitude and a yearning to connect. . .
Murakami, always inventive, is one of the finest popular writers at
work today
*Evening Standard*
Written with all the cats, spaghetti, humor, and gentle surrealism
we might expect . . . Men Without Women is a funny, lovely,
unmistakably Murakami collection of seven stories about the lives
of people trying to find their place in the world and reckoning
with their pasts
*Buzzfeed*
A disconcertingly funny portrait of modern loneliness
*Vogue*
Self-schooled and uncontaminated by writerly edicts, the
68-year-old presents subjects directly on a platter before the
reader. . . but stirs up all kinds of themes and truths in the
allegorical mud through his gentle, almost conversational style
*Irish Independent*
One of the finest pieces of short-form writing I have enjoyed in
many years… If the familiar way of Haruki Murakami are an
enthusiasm, there is plenty here to divert the aficionado, but he
also takes a turn into riskier territory that could well coax new
readers into his distinctive world
*Herald*
Moments of melancholy and humour mix with acute observation in the
latest offering by Japan’s master storyteller
*Financial Times*
A man who starves to death for love, a woman who claims she used to
be a lamprey eel, a mysterious whiskey drinker who scares away
gangsters – it is the secondary characters who truly come alive in
these tales. Peppered with strange women and passive men,
unexpected suicides and cats, these vignettes will leave readers
questioning, and linger in the mind
*India Stoughton*
A collection like Men Without Women [restores] my faith...in how
utterly perfect [short stories] can be... each of the seven stories
here… a gem in and of its own right, but strung together they’re a
sparkling strand of precious stones, the light refracted from each
equally brilliant but the tones varying subtly.
*Independent*
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