Haruki Murakami 村上春樹

Books in English

1987   Hear the Wind Sing
1985   Pinball	
1989   A Wild Sheep Chase ✓
1991   Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
1993   (The Elephant Vanishes)
2000   Norwegian Wood
2000   (after the quake) ✓
1994   Dance Dance Dance
2000   South of the Border, West of the Sun
1997   The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle	
2001   Sputnik Sweetheart ✓
2005   Kafka on the Shore ✓
2006   (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman) ✓
2007   After Dark

Exhaustive bio/bibliographic information can be found at Wikipedia,
including links to numerous fan and promo sites.

BokREA*

It's a tradition! Every year in the last week of February, all Swedish bookstores and book departments have a big blowout sale. It gives one something to look forward to in these bleakest of months. Actually, a lot of the inventory is what, in American bookstores, would be called "bargain stock:" short-runs, overstock and reprints produced for reduced sale. But there is a festival anticipation to the event; everyone rushing in on the first days to grab the best deals. Otherwise Swedish books tend to be rather expensive, although there has been a recent overall price-drop. And, of course, this being bi-lingual Sweden, there are always a few Engelska titles. Recently, I suspect, the whole affair has become rather formulaic, unlike the mid Twentieth Century when books and records were heavily taxed. In the end, it's just another excuse for Swedes to celebrate, which they love to do.

Gibsonísme (51)

AFTER THE GYRATORY
by Bill

"Like entering a game, a layout, something flat and mazed, arbitrarily but fractally constructed from beautifully detailed but somehow unreal buildings, its code perhaps reshuffled since the last time he’d been here. The pixels that comprised it were familiar, but it remained only provisionally mapped, a protean territory, a box of tricks, possibly benign. This last owing, he suspected, to his having relatively little history here, prior to Basel."

Question: At what point does prose become poetry?

(Via GibsonBlog.)

Personal Heroes

If you only have a passing acquaintance with John Cheever and would like to know more, this:

The First Suburbanite, Before John Updike and Richard Yates, There Was John Cheever. By CHARLES McGRATH, New York Times, February 27, 2009, is a well-written review of the biography soon to be/or just published by Alfred Knopf. There is also a teaser for Blake Bailey's biography at Vice Magazine, Vol. 15, No. 5

Perhaps you're not as interested in him as I am - that's understandable - but I really think he's one of the most important American authors of the Twentieth Century, all too often neglected for complex reasons of perceived lack of profundity, coupled with residual homophobia. But I think no one since Chekhov has found as much poignant beauty in the ordinary, or plumbed such depths of human complexity.

(Via Band of Thebes.)

A wicked tongue...

I was so taken by yesterday's idea of columns-within-the-blog that I decided to construct one for my other great passion: books. Alas I haven't written anything on the subject recently; and I'm still deeply involved in City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara, by Brad Gooch. (see in Sidebar, and click for the FO'H site) It's a big, thick tome: 470 pages, not including Notes and Index. It is, for me, a "read-before-going-to-sleep" book; the kind one takes in small enjoyable morsels, over time, letting it become part of one's daytime state-of-mind by inducing doses just before sleep. Eventually, I'll formulate an opinion of it and him. But right now I'm just enjoying the process.

Biographies of poets are, in my mind, both fascinating and frustrating. But I can't seem to get enough of them. An example is the last big one I read: Hart Crane: A Life, by Clive Fisher, which left me in an absolute fury. What a selfish, rich, self-pitying little shit! I've learned, over the years not to do bad reviews unless there's simply nothing else to say. Or, even better, say nothing. Perhaps the writer himself wasn't sympathetic, and someone who really liked Crane would tell the story in much different terms. But this was a book I hurried to finish and, through the last half, kept considering giving up altogether, except that I was curious about his death. I concluded, however that he was definitely a man I would not have wanted to know (no matter how sexually acrobatic he may have been), which sounds priggish, I know. Maybe I was just dramatizing to cover my own inability to find any merit in his pretentious poetry, when so many people admire it.

Whatever the final judgement, I'd better give you the full particulars, dear reader, so you can make up your own mind (although I wouldn't recommend it), and I've included a bit of review, filched from Google.

Hart Crane: A Life; By Clive Fisher; Edition: illustrated; Published by Yale University Press, 2002; ISBN 0300090617, 9780300090611; 567 pages

A gifted writer with a weakness for alcohol, a demanding mother and an untimely death by suicide, American lyric poet Hart Crane (1899-1932) might easily be mistaken for Ernest Hemingway, who was born the same day a few hundred miles away. Crane’s tragedies and creative struggles, like Hemingway’s, make for compelling biographical fodder. Clive Fisher, a very close reader, explicates attentively, and his meticulous detective work also sheds light on Crane’s forays into the gay underworld and the tense family dynamics that dominated much of his life. The book is less successful at sustaining a historical and intellectual trajectory, and, like his subject, Fisher likes to indulge in the occasional ecstatic ramble. Cahners Business Information (c) 2002