First Person Singular
Stories
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4.0 • 92 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BEST SELLER • A mind-bending new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author. • “Some novelists hold a mirror up to the world and some, like Haruki Murakami, use the mirror as a portal to a universe hidden beyond it.” —The Wall Street Journal
The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides.
Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory. . . all with a signature Murakami twist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Murakami's engrossing collection (after the novel Killing Commendatore) offers a crash course in his singular style and vision, blending passion for music and baseball and nostalgia for youth with portrayals of young love and moments of magical realism. The one thing shared by the collection's eight stories is their use of the first-person-singular voice. Murakami's gift for evocative, opaque magical realism shines in "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova," in which a review of a fictional album breathes new life into the ghost of the jazz great, and "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey," wherein a talking monkey ruminates with a traveler on love and belonging. Murakami finds ample material in young love and sex, showcased in "On a Stone Pillow," in which a young man's brief tryst with a coworker, unremarkable in itself, takes on a degree of immortality after she mails him her poetry. In "The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection," the collection's one nonfiction piece, Murakami recounts how baseball and writing, the twin passions of his youth, grew together in the stadium of his beloved Yakult Swallows. These shimmering stories are testament to Murakami's talent and enduring creativity.
Customer Reviews
not great
this is the first book by HM that i didn’t enjoy. don’t quite get the point of it. its like a bunch of papers he found on his desk one day and just submitted it as a book.