Guide to magical realism

Reading lists

A guide to magical realism

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End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland

His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind

A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head

Combines a witty sci-fi pastiche and a dream-like Utopian fantasy in two separate narratives which alternate in an interweave of precognition and deja vu

Haruki Murakami (Author) 
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine 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, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 
 
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers. 
 
Jay Rubin (Translator) 
Jay Rubin is the author of Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State and Making Sense of Japanese, and he edited Modern Japanese Writers for the Scribner Writers Series. He has translated into English two novels by the Japanese writer Soseki Natsume, and also Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and after the quake.

A special hardback edition of Murakami's surreal, mind-bending masterpiece, in a new, unabridged translation from Jay Rubin. 
 
A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, The End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. 
 
Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy. 
 
This edition is a newly unabridged translation from long-time Murakami collaborator, Jay Rubin. 
 
'A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head' Jay McInerney

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

STEP INTO THE CITY 
 
When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own. 
 
When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose. 
 
A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times. 
 
 
PRAISE FOR HARUKI MURAKAMI 
 
'The world's most popular cult novelist' Guardian 
 
'Wild and thrilling. . . Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked' Sunday Times 
 
'Totally gripping' Daily Express 
 
'It’s safe to say that there’s no one like Murakami' Literary Review 
 
'No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades' Financial Times

A 'cosy' masterpiece with agony between its lines… [The City and Its Uncertain Walls is] quietly miraculous… The greatest books…are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries

No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades.

Regular readers will delight in the Easter eggs nested in an unsettling quest spun from Murakami’s long-patented dream logic

An enveloping magical realist story

A mysterious, magical book that reveals itself like a secret being said. Murakami offers a beguiling look at self and the lengths we go to for love

A long, leisurely novel that jumps between here and there, fantasy and reality, and then and now. The result is very Murakamiesque

A sublime meditation on time, age and love

Murakami’s favourite motifs proliferate as the boundaries between the real and unreal, conscious and unconscious, blur

Beguilingly enigmatic...Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror, and coming-of-age story... deftly weaves ordinary reality—“something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives”—with a shadow world that is at once eerie and beautiful. Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales.

Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked

It’s safe to say that there’s no one like Murakami.

Murakami…stays true to form with this novel… a speculative fantasy with a faintly creepy undertow

Haruki Murakami (Author) 
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine 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, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 
 
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers. 
 
Philip Gabriel (Translator) 
Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

An exploration of a writer’s life from the Sunday Times bestselling author

Novelist as a Vocation

Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles. 
 
'You end this collection…vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again' Guardian 
 
Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his beautifully surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing. 
 
In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians. 
 
'Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers' New York Times Book Review 
 
'A fascinating glimpse of the peculiar writerly life' Sunday Times 
 
** A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES and NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR**

[The] 11 essays here… deal with all the things that you’d like to ask [Murakami]…in the highly unlikely event that you were able to corner him at a book-signing session… You end this collection of beautiful essays vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again

Haruki Murakami (Author) In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine 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, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 
 
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers. Philip Gabriel (Translator) Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Ted Goossen (Translator) Theodore (Ted) Goossen has translated the work 
of many Japanese writers, most notably Naoya 
Shiga, Haruki Murakami, and Hiromi Kawakami. 
He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese 
Short Stories (1997) and the co-editor and founder, with Motoyuki Shibata, of the annual 
literary journal Monkey Business (now Monkey: 
new writing from Japan), which, since 2011, has 
introduced a new generation of Japanese writers to English-speaking readers. Essays and stories by, as well as interviews with, Murakami are a staple of every issue.

Sputnik Sweetheart

a deluxe gift edition of Murakami’s masterful tale of unrequited love

Sputnik Sweetheart has touched me deeper and pushed me further than anything I've read in a long time

How does Murakami manage to make poetry while writing of contemporary life and emotions?  I am weak-kneed with admiration

A beautiful novel, as light as a feather, and yet enduringly sad... a captivating book from one of the world's most interesting authors

Murakami has been compared to everyone from Raymond Carver to Raymond Chandler - which should tell you only one thing: he's unique

Confirms Murakami as a master of his craft... Out of this world

Haruki Murakami (Author, Introducer) In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine 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, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 
 
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's classic mystery story about love, the cosmos and other fictional universes, now with a new introduction by the author 
 
Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. Miu is glamorous and successful. Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel. 
 
Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire, and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her? Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own unrequited love for Sumire. 
 
Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished... 
 
'Confirms Murakami as a master of his craft... Out of this world' Time Out

After Dark

Murakami’s atmospheric masterpiece, now in a deluxe gift edition

For sheer love of a thumping narrative, the novel delivers gloriously-Inventive, alluring

A magnificently bewildering achievement-Brilliantly conceived, bold in its surreal scope, sexy and driven by a snappy plot-Exuberant storytelling

A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's mesmerizingly evocative classic, now with a new introduction by the author 
 
Eyes mark the shape of the city 
 
The midnight hour approaches in an almost-empty diner. Mari sips her coffee and reads a book, but soon her solitude is disturbed: a girl has been beaten up at the Alphaville hotel, and needs Mari's help. 
 
Meanwhile Mari's beautiful sister Eri lies in a deep, heavy sleep that is 'too perfect, too pure' to be normal; it has lasted for two months. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00, a hint of life flickers across the television screen in her room, even though its plug has been pulled out. 
 
Strange nocturnal happenings, or a trick of the night? 
 
'A captivating mood piece, delicate and wistful' Evening Standard

A Wild Sheep Chase

the surreal, breakout detective novel, now in a deluxe gift edition

Special 3D Edition

Wonderfully easy to read and just as wonderfully difficult to make sense of...like the narrator, who slowly accepts the presence in his life of mystery, we slowly recognize the possibility of a new kind of world. Like him, we lean forward and topple headlong into magic

It begins as a detective novel, dips into a screwball comedy, and at its close becomes a tale of possession...A highly accomplished piece of craftsmanship

Mr. Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving

A Wild Sheep Chase has the conventional hull of a thriller - a quest, a mystery, an extraordinary woman, and plenty of elegant duress - but its fantastic superstructure transforms it into something quite different...a science fiction fantasy, a romance, a metaphysical tease, or a dramatisation of philosophical ideas

If you consider yourself an intelligent, sensitive common reader but wish to accommodate something a little removed from your experience, and probably your imagination, I dare you to turn your eyes towards Murakami and head off on a wild sheep chase.

A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's brilliantly surreal, detective-story classic, now with a new introduction by the author. 
 
The man was leading an aimless life, time passing, one big blank. His girlfriend has perfectly formed ears, ears with the power to bewitch, marvels of creation. The man receives a letter from a friend, enclosing a seemingly innocent photograph of sheep, and a request: place the photograph somewhere it will be seen. 
 
Then, one September afternoon, the phone rings, and the adventure begins. Welcome to the wild sheep chase. 
 
'Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving' New York Times

Haruki Murakami

Enter the surreal and enchanting world of Haruki Murakami 
 
Toru Okada's cat has disappeared. 
 
His wife is growing more distant every day. 
 
Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving. 
 
As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out. He embarks on a bizarre journey, guided by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell. 
 
'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original' The Times 
 
VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS series - five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

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Grab three collectible editions of Murakami's greatest works over on the Penguin Shop.

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Photo of the Haruki Murakami gift bundle available on the Penguin Shop. The books included in this bundle are Kafka on the Shore designed by Kyoko Nakamura, Norwegian Wood designed by Takeshi Miyasaka and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle designed by Heisuke Kitazawa

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