Aug 6, 2019
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism / with No comments /
Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom.Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism / with No comments /
'A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following.1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism / with No comments /
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.”
Hear the Wind Sing (The Rat #1) by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism, The Rat Series / with No comments /
Hear the Wind Sing is the first novel by Haruki Murakami. First published in the June 1979 issue of Gunzo, one of the most influential literary magazines in Japan, it was published one month later as a book.Hear the Wind Sing is the first book in the "Trilogy of the Rat," a series of independent novels that include Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase, followed by the epilogue Dance Dance Dance.
Pinball, 1973 (The Rat #2) by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism, The Rat Series / with No comments /
The plot centers on the narrator's brief but intense obsession with pinball, his life as a freelance translator, and his later efforts to reunite with the old pinball machine that he used to play. He describes living with a pair of identical unnamed female twins, who mysteriously appear in his apartment one morning, and disappear at the end of the book.A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat #3) by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism, The Rat Series / with No comments /
His life was like a recurring nightmare: a train to nowhere. But an ordinary life has a way of taking an extraordinary turn. Add a girl whose ears are so exquisite that, when uncovered, they improve sex a thousand-fold, a runaway friend, a right-wing politico, an ovine-obsessed professor and a manic-depressive in a sheep outfit, implicate them in a hunt for a sheep, that may or may not be running the world, and the upshot is another singular masterpiece from Japan's finest novelist.Dance Dance Dance (The Rat #4) by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism, The Rat Series / with No comments /
High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance.Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism, Novels / with No comments /
The epic new novel from the internationally acclaimed and best-selling author of 1Q84In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances.
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism / with No comments /
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
August 06, 2019 / in Cultural-Japan, Fiction and Fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Magical Realism / with No comments /
Jul 25, 2019
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
July 25, 2019 / in Eowyn Ivey, Fiction and Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism / with No comments /
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.Jul 23, 2019
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Khalifa Brothers #1) by Salman Rushdie
July 23, 2019 / in Childrens, Fiction and Fantasy, Khalifa Brothers Series, Magical Realism, Salman Rushdie, Young Adult / with No comments /
Discover Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie’s classic fantasy novelSet in an exotic Eastern landscape peopled by magicians and fantastic talking animals, Salman Rushdie's classic children's novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories inhabits the same imaginative space as The Lord of the Rings, The Alchemist, and The Wizard of Oz.
Luka and the Fire of Life (Khalifa Brothers #2) by Salman Rushdie
July 23, 2019 / in Fiction and Fantasy, Khalifa Brothers Series, Magical Realism, Salman Rushdie, Young Adult / with No comments /
With the same dazzling imagination and love of language that have made Salman Rushdie one of the great storytellers of our time, Luka and the Fire of Life revisits the magic-infused, intricate world he first brought to life in the modern classic Haroun and the Sea of Stories. This breathtaking new novel centers on Luka, Haroun’s younger brother, who must save his father from certain doom.The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
July 23, 2019 / in Classics, Magical Realism, Salman Rushdie / with No comments /
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.Garden Spells (Waverley Family #1) by Sarah Addison Allen
July 23, 2019 / in Magic, Magical Realism, Romance, Sarah Addison Allen, Waverley Family Series / with No comments /
The women of the Waverley family -- whether they like it or not -- are heirs to an unusual legacy, one that grows in a fenced plot behind their Queen Anne home on Pendland Street in Bascom, North Carolina. There, an apple tree bearing fruit of magical properties looms over a garden filled with herbs and edible flowers that possess the power to affect in curious ways anyone who eats them.First Frost (Waverley Family #2) by Sarah Addison Allen
July 23, 2019 / in Contemporary, Magical Realism, Romance, Sarah Addison Allen, Waverley Family Series / with No comments /
From the New York Times bestselling author of Garden Spells comes a story of the Waverley family, in a novel as sparkling as the first dusting of frost on new-fallen leaves..It's October in Bascom, North Carolina, and autumn will not go quietly. As temperatures drop and leaves begin to turn, the Waverley women are made restless by the whims of their mischievous apple tree... and all the magic that swirls around it. But this year, first frost has much more in store.
May 2, 2019
Chocolat (Chocolat #1) by Joanne Harris
May 02, 2019 / in Cultural-France, Joanne Harris, Magical Realism, Romance / with No comments /
Illuminating Peter Mayle's South of France with a touch of Laura Esquivel's magic realism, Chocolat is a timeless novel of a straitlaced village's awakening to joy and sensuality.



