Fans of Mr. Murakami are getting spoiled this season. Not only have we been busy reading his most recent release, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, but The New York Times reported yesterday that Knopf will be releasing the author’s next title, The Strange Library, this coming December. Considerably shorter than some of his more recent works at 96 pages, the tale is said to be as strange and wonderful as anything Murakami has written. Read the full article over on the NYT page. We can’t wait until December!
Praise for Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Piligrimage:
“Murakami has created one of those rare stories where the language reflects the protagonist. Each word is carefully placed, just as Tsukuru Tazaki meticulously lives his life, putting up barriers between himself and the people who could break his heart. It is a well-crafted and intriguing novel that I couldn’t put down.”
–Consuelo, BookPeople Bookseller
“A return to the mood and subject matter of the acclaimed writer’s earlier work. . . . A vintage Murakami struggle of coming to terms with buried emotions and missed opportunities, in which intentions and pent up desires can seemingly transcend time and space to bring both solace and desolation.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A devotional anticipation is generated by the announcement of a new Haruki Murakami book. Readers wait for his work the way past generations lined up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan. There is a happily frenzied collective expectancy—the effect of cultural voice, the Murakami effect. . . . [Colorless Tsukuru] is a book for both the new and experienced reader. . . . The book reveals another side of Murakami, one not so easy to pin down. Incurably restive, ambiguous and valiantly struggling toward a new level of maturation. A shedding of Murakami skin. It is not ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ it is ‘Blood on the Tracks.’ . . .”
–Patti Smith, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
“Intoxicating. . . . It’s hard to think of another writer who is as popular, as strange, and as lionized as Haruki Murakami is. . . . At first glance, you might think that Murakami has no overlap with that other writer whose work gets people lining up at midnight, J.K. Rowling. And yet they do have something in common. Both of them are comfortable creating their own specific and elaborate house blend of fantasy and reality. And as a result, they each shape a world that is recognizably their own. . . .”
—Meg Wolitzer, NPR
BookPeople 