Kafka on the Shore

Despite the naysayers, Valentine’s Day is still an occasion to celebrate the one you love and to tell them exactly how you feel. As you hold your feathered quill over a card for your beloved, worn but beloved phrases like, “Let me count the ways” may come to mind, but if you’re writing sweet nothings for […]

Serial killers are disproportionately common in fiction (well, we hope, anyway). There’s just something darkly fascinating about human beings who so completely slip the bonds of civilization—aand that fascination occasionally inspires an author to come up with a killer so deranged, the violence becomes something like poetry. The list of bizarre serial killers is long […]

For genres obsessed with ideas and new concepts, science fiction and fantasy produce a surprising number of comprehensible stories with well-defined settings, sharply shaded characters, and plots that coalesce into a perfectly sensible series of events—once you push through a few twists and reveals. And then there are the eight books on this list. These […]

Haruki Murakami is one of those writers who’s tipped each year as a Nobel contender; widely acclaimed as a genius, his distinctive magical-realist style is both deceptively simple and dense, delving into the interior lives of his characters in a very literal fashion. He’s a writer whose work seems to speak personally to everyone who reads […]