Haruki Murakami

The great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami once translated The Great Gatsby for Japanese readers. In Columbia University Press’ In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means anthology, you can read an essay he wrote about translating the book:

"When someone asks, “Which three books have meant the most to you?” I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye."

The How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia author adopted Murakami's philosophy of prioritizing physical fitness in order to maximize creativity—and reaped the benefits.

Here's how to get a writer's body in seven days. Spend hours hunched over a keyboard in low light, exercising nothing but your eyelids and your finger muscles. Subsist on coffee, cigarettes, and the occasional croissant. Drink no water; whiskey's better. Look up at your heroes on the wall: sickly, malnourished, funny-looking people who died of lupus and liver failure on the hot trail of the truth.

 Vintage Books and Aimer Media have released a Haruki Murakami diary app containing six new exclusive short stories by the Japanese author, as well as a selection of quotations from his 13 backlist titles and latest novel, 1Q84.

The app, for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, is priced £1.99. Other material and features include the cover artwork from the author's newly-designed backlist, the ability to add, organise and delete events quickly and easily, share favourite quotes via email and social media, and access to iBooks without leaving the app…

Electronic time moves faster than real time. Just three years ago, the book world was having a collective nervous breakdown about "the future of the book". But now those fears are fading. Christmas 2011 was the all-time ebook holiday. Amazon reports worldwide sales of more than a million Kindles a week, with record demand led by its Kindle Fire tablet.

 

Even as more readers switch to the convenience of e-books, publishers are giving old-fashioned print books a makeover. Publishers are putting more thought into books' aesthetics. Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading. When people do beautiful books, theyre noticed more, said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. Its like

Speculation about the winner focused on many of the same writers who were deemed favorites last year: Adonis, a Syrian poet; Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet; Assia Djebar, an Algerian novelist; and Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist whose hugely anticipated book “1Q84” will be released on Oct. 25.

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