Haruki Murakami’s latest book – the title of which translates to Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage – went on sale in Japan last month, and in that time it’s been selling over a million copies a week. You can catch a glimpse of the book’s first and earliest reviews over at the NY Daily News. (By the way, did you know Murakami translated The Great Gatsby into Japanese?)
Murakami’s Latest is Flying Off the Shelves
Okay, but the Sample Size Tho
“It’s possible that when it comes to books, we have overestimated the means of delivery and have underestimated the importance of the content conveyed in the media.” A recent study demonstrated that preschoolers demonstrated the same level of reading comprehension regardless of whether the story they were, ahem, consuming came in digital or analog form, reports MOBY Lives. For more on the print vs. screen debate, see Alix Christie on the persistence of physical books; and of course it would be criminal not to mention our own founder C. Max Magee‘s killer compilation The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books.
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Tourney Time!
The Morning News has announced the list of judges and, more importantly, the books in contention for the 2011 Tournament of Books. Yours truly is among the judges again this year and very excited for the action to get underway.
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Ich bin ein Berliner
The kind souls at NYRB Classics have nicely posted the first story from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, “Good Morning, Giantess!” on their Tumblr. The collection got a nice little write up in this weekend’s New York Times, too.
“I Will Ruin Him”
Creative writing teachers ply a hazardous trade. Don’t believe us? Then maybe this frightening tale — excerpted from an upcoming book, Give Me Everything You Have, which you can read more about in our preview — will help change your mind.
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On people braver than us:
Erika Anderson recites her teenage poetry at readings and shares her reasoning for doing so. “I want to live where irony meets kindness, where daring meets bullshit, where everything that failed meets the hope that something might not. I hope my readers do too.”
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Baby Shoes Still Unworn
“These stories feature hookups and breakups, substance abuse, and violence so casual it’s as natural as jagged breathing.” Electric Literature has an interview between flash fiction author Len Kuntz and critic and writer David Galef, whose Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook was just published by Columbia University Press. The two discuss the state of short fiction, their favorite one-line stories of the year, and how, even in the briefest of narratives, readers should still “feel a connection to the story and characters.” For more ultra-lean tales, see our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s review of Hint Fiction, an anthology of 25-words-and-under short stories.
Adam Bomb and Friends
Max Axe here. I was seven years old when the Garbage Pail Kids debuted and quickly became all the rage, so news that this Garbage Pail Kids book – with an introduction by creator Art Spiegelman – is hitting bookstores now is transporting me back to my schoolyard days. (Also, how did I not know until now that Spiegelman was behind GPK?)
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Feral Houses
Cities like Detroit and Cleveland aren’t dying, Anne Trubek says. Growth is everywhere.
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