A mindbending new collection of short stories from the unique, internationally acclaimed author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERThe eight masterly stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From nostalgic memories of youth, meditations on music and an ardent love of baseball to dreamlike scenarios, an encounter with a talking monkey and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world.
Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Murakami himself is present. 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.
Acclaimed cultural critic Greil Marcus tells the story of Bob Dylan through the lens of seven penetrating songs "The most interesting writer on Dylan over the years has been the cultural critic Greil Marcus. . .
. No one alive knows the music that fueled Dylan's imagination better. .
. . Folk Music .
. . [is an] ingenious book of close listening."-David Remnick, New Yorker Named a Best Music Book of 2022 by Rolling Stone "Further elevates Marcus to what he has always been: a supreme artist-critic."-Hilton Als Across seven decades, Bob Dylan has been the first singer of American song.
As a writer and performer, he has rewritten the national songbook in a way that comes from his own vision and yet can feel as if it belongs to anyone who might listen. In Folk Music, Greil Marcus tells Dylan's story through seven of his most transformative songs. Marcus's point of departure is Dylan's ability to "see myself in others." Like Dylan's songs, this book is a work of implicit patriotism and creative skepticism.
It illuminates Dylan's continuing presence and relevance through his empathy-his imaginative identification with other people. This is not only a deeply felt telling of the life and times of Bob Dylan but a rich history of American folk songs and the new life they were given as Dylan sat down to write his own.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - Winner of the John Gardner Fiction Award - A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist - A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Freedom, by New York Times-bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads, is a masterly novel of contemporary love and marriage, a brilliant charting of the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire.
Patty and Walter Berglund were the pioneers of old St. Paul--the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, they have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter, once an environmental lawyer, taken a job working with Big Coal? Most startling of all, why has Patty, the perfect neighbor, turned into the local Fury?
Patty and Walter Berglund are indelible characters, and their mistakes and joys, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, have become touchstones of contemporary American reality.