What to do this Valentine’s? Join us this Friday, February 9, from 6-9pm at Booktopia for Cozy Conversations — an engaging evening chatting about Heartbreak, a new book featuring stories from ten of the country’s promising and prolific writers. Get a chance to meet some of the authors and have your book signed. Mingle and get into intimate discussions with other book lovers. Who knew Heartbreak can be this cozy?

Heartbreak: Stories That Will Stay With You Longer Than Your Ex Did
by Cel Coscolluela (Ed.)

Cozy Reads proudly presents Heartbreak, a collection of stories featuring new and exciting voices alongside prize-winning authors, all of whom tell the story of love’s many disappointments with the grace and wisdom of the experienced.

A jaded model lands a gig at a fantasy convention where she dons an Arwen costume and promptly falls for a man who calls himself “Aragorn.”

A woman files for annulment, and on the very same day, loses an arm when the train she is riding gets bombed.

A perennially single twentysomething contemplates wedding invitations until her romantic prospect comes knocking on her hotel room, arm in arm with another man.

Here are ten stories that show the tragedy and comedy that is heartbreak. A demonstration of the human propensity for getting high on an emotion that, unfortunately, also has the power to bring anyone crashing down. Unfortunate? Yes. Inevitable? Perhaps. And does it make for a good read? Absolutely.

Booktopia is proud to soon be carrying two new publications from some very talented Filipino authors.

Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 2
by Dean Francis Alfar (Editor)

First, there’s Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 2, a collection of short fiction of the imagination (including fantasy, science fiction, horror, magic realism and surrealism) written by Filipinos at home and abroad. Nineteen authors are represented, both new and established, from all over the Philippines and as far away as France and The Netherlands. The only anthology of its kind in the country, the previous volume was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Best Anthology.

Editor Dean Francis Alfar is an advocate of the literature of the fantastic. His plays have been performed in venues across the Philippines, while his fiction has been published in national (Philippines Free Press, Story Philippines, Manual, Digest of Philippine Genre Stories) and international markets (Strange Horizons, Rabid Transit: Menagerie and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror). His writing awards include nine Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, including the Grand Prize for Novel in 2005 for Salamanca (Ateneo Press, 2006). He was the recipient of the National Book Award for the graphic novels Siglo: Freedom and Siglo: Passion. His first collection of short fiction, The Kite of Stars and other stories, is scheduled by Anvil Publishing for release in 2007.

Read full write-up

The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, Volume 1
by Kenneth Yu (Editor)

View full cover art

The second one is a collection of genre stories in digest form. This is a small magazine format, just like Reader’s Digest. Other well-known magazines in this format would be the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. As you can see, the digest format is very popular with genre fiction. Genre stories are those that fit into specific genres like science fiction, fantasy, mystery, crime, horror, detective, etc. The premiere issue has a mix of fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction.

An excerpt from The Middle Prince, by Dean Francis Alfar:
The middle prince soon found himself unable to bear the weight of the fishes’ declarations, and clutched at his bleeding ears vainly in an effort to stifle the power of the multiple assertions. The last thing he remembered hearing before he lost his ability to comprehend the vision of thousands of coruscating mouths and slipped into darkness, was a voice that said: “There is nothing more precious than a love foretold, and nothing as equally damning.”

An excerpt from Wail Of The Sun, by Vince Simbulan:
He dreamed of riding to battle on sheets of flame, of reducing whole armies to ash, of razing castles to the ground. He was Rubric again, and fire obeyed his every whim. Then the dream descended into nightmare, scenes of his final battle, of his greatest triumph over the Witch-Queen Amarath destroyed by her final curse, and Rubric could only wail in horror when his flames betrayed him as a stray fireball reduced his wife and his world to ashes.

An excerpt from Thriller, by Andrew Drilon:
“I was at the mall when it broke out,” he says, “I managed to get this rifle and a pack of bullets before I got out, but guns only get you so far. There were five of us a couple hours ago; now, it’s just me.”

An excerpt from Insomnia, by Joseph Nacino:
5 April 2006… So I managed to talk to Justine’s friend, Eden, in Diliman and this is getting stranger by the minute. It seems that the language Justine isolated from the taped conversations are really old, older even than Latin. Eden told me she’ll get back to me on the translations. She seemed really excited…

An excerpt from Inhuman, by Alexander Marcos Osias:
“What name will you answer to? Tell us, in the name of Jesus. What name will you answer to?”

A long wail escaped from Marcel’s throat before it turned to a soft snicker.

“We have many names.” The words seemed spoken by neither male nor female, and was full of strange echoes and distortions, as though a million voices had uttered them in unison through a narrow crack in a thin, splintering door. “Do you want them all?”

Remember the book videos we featured a few months ago? Last month, a new set of videos won for the Teen Edition of the Book Video Awards. Here are the winning videos and the books they were based on. Please note that the videos are in MPEG4 format and may take a while to load.

These are some of the best young adult fiction for the year 2006. All three have garnered numerous awards and praises. All are currently available at Booktopia Libis.

The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak

Description:
It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . . .

Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.

This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul.

Read an excerpt
View the video or download for your iPod
About writing The Book Thief

A Great and Terrible Beauty
by Libba Bray

Description:
It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma’s reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she’s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence’s most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to?

Read an excerpt
View the video or download for your iPod

How I Live Now
by Meg Rosoff

Description:
“Every war has turning points and every person too.”

Fifteen-year-old Daisy is sent from Manhattan to England to visit her aunt and cousins she’s never met: three boys near her age, and their little sister. Her aunt goes away on business soon after Daisy arrives. The next day bombs go off as London is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy.

As power fails, and systems fail, the farm becomes more isolated. Despite the war, it’s a kind of Eden, with no adults in charge and no rules, a place where Daisy’s uncanny bond with her cousins grows into something rare and extraordinary. But the war is everywhere, and Daisy and her cousins must lead each other into a world that is unknown in the scariest, most elemental way.

A riveting and astonishing story.

Read an excerpt
View the video or download for your iPod

This book does not need to be introduced to our regular readers as the first collection of Nick Hornby’s essays has always been a bestseller at the store. This is the follow-up to The Polysyllabic Spree.

Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt
by Nick Hornby

Description:
In this latest collection of essays following The Polysyllabic Spree, critic and author Nick Hornby continues the feverish survey of his swollen bookshelves, offering a funny, intelligent, and unblinkered account of the stuff he’s been reading. Ranging from the middlebrow to the highbrow (with unrepenting dips into the lowbrow), Hornby’s dispatches from his nightstand table serve as useful guides to contemporary letters, with revelations on contemporary culture, the intellectual scene, and English football, in equal measure.

Those who have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking would already have been introduced to psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman. Dr. Ekman developed the Facial Action Coding System which catalogued every possible human facial expression. He was such an expert on facial expressions that he could easily tell just by looking at faces if a person was lying, if a marriage was going to last, if someone’s joy was sincere. Blink readers fascinated by this uncanny skill will be glad to know that we have two of Dr. Ekman’s books at the store.

Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life
by Paul Ekman

Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage
by Paul Ekman

Here is a link to an interesting interview/conversation with Dr. Ekman.

Below is an excerpt from the preface of Emotions Revealed.

My goal in writing Emotions Revealed was to help people improve four essential skills, and thus I have included suggestions and exercises in the book that I hope you will find both helpful and provocative.

Those four skills are:

First, becoming more consciously aware of when you are becoming emotional, even before you speak or act. This is the hardest skill to acquire. Developing this skill allows you to have some choice about when you are emotional.

Second, choosing how you behave when you are emotional, so you achieve your goals without damaging other people. The purpose of emotional episodes is to help us quickly achieve our objectives, whether to draw people to comfort us, scare off a perpetrator, or some other of thousands of goals. The best emotional episodes do no harm to and cause no problems for those with whom we are engaged. This is not an easy skill to develop, but with practice it can become part of your life.

Third, becoming more sensitive to how others are feeling. Since emotions are at the core of every important relationship we have, we must be sensitive to how others are feeling.

Fourth, carefully using the information you acquire about how others are feeling. Sometimes that means asking the person about the emotion you have spotted, acknowledging how he or she is feeling, or re-calibrating your own reactions in light of what you have recognized. Your response will depend on who the other person is and the history of your relationship with that person. How this varies within a family, in the workplace, and in friendship is explained in the book.

Author William Styron died of pneumonia at the age of 81 last week. He was the author of The Confessions of Nat Turner (Pulitzer Prize) and is more famously known for Sophie’s Choice (National Book Award), the story of a Holocaust survivor who was forced to choose between her two children while incarcerated in Auschwitz. The book was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Meryl Streep.

Although his works were known to be always dark and depressing, Styron was well-connected with Bill Clinton dropping by for dinner, being friends with Kurt Vonnegut, and being in the same circles as Arthur Miller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Excerpt: ‘Sophie’s Choice’
by William Styron

In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. This was in 1947, and one of the pleasant features of that summer which I so vividly remember was the weather, which was sunny and mild, flower-fragrant, almost as if the days had been arrested in a seemingly perpetual springtime. I was grateful for that if for nothing else, since my youth, I felt, was at its lowest ebb. At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided. It was not that I no longer wanted to write, I still yearned passionately to produce the novel which had been for so long captive in my brain. It was only that, having written down the first few fine paragraphs, I could not produce any others, or—to approximate Gertrude Stein’s remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation—I had the syrup but it wouldn’t pour. To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome young Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.

Call me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all. The name derives from my prep-school days down in my native state of Virginia. This school was a pleasant institution to which I was sent at fourteen by my distraught father, who found me difficult to handle after my mother died. Among my other disheveled qualities was apparently an inattention to personal hygiene, hence I soon became known as Stinky. But the years passed. The abrasive labor of time, together with a radical change of habits (I was in fact shamed into becoming almost obsessively clean), gradually wore down the harsh syllabic brusqueness of the name, slurring off into the more attractive, or less unattractive, certainly sportier Stingo. Sometime during my thirties the nickname and I mysteriously parted company, Stingo merely evaporating like a wan ghost out of my existence, leaving me indifferent to the loss. But Stingo I still was during this time about which I write. If, however, it is perplexing that the name is absent from the earlier part of this narrative, it may be understood that I am describing a morbid and solitary period in my life when, like the crazy hermit in the cave on the hill, I was rarely called by any name at all.

I was glad to be shut of my job—the first and only salaried position, excluding the military, of my life—even though its loss seriously undermined my already modest solvency. Also, I now think it was constructive to learn so early in life that I would never fit in as an office worker, anytime, anywhere. In fact, considering how I had so coveted the job in the first place, I was rather surprised at the relief, indeed the alacrity, with which I accepted my dismissal only five months later. In 1947 jobs were scarce, especially jobs in publishing, but a stroke of luck had landed me employment with one of the largest publishers of books, where I was made “junior editor”—a euphemism for manuscript reader. That the employer called the tune, in those days when the dollar was much more valuable tender than it is now, may be seen in the stark terms of my salary—forty dollars a week. After withholding taxes this meant that the anemic blue check placed on my desk each Friday by the hunchbacked little woman who managed the payroll represented emolument in the nature of a little over ninety cents an hour. But I had not been in the least dismayed by the fact that these coolie wages were dispensed by one of the most powerful and wealthy publishers in the world; young and resilient, I approached my job—at least at the very beginning—with a sense of lofty purpose; and besides, in compensation, the work bore intimations of glamour: lunch at “21,” dinner with John O’Hara, poised and brilliant but carnal-minded lady writers melting at my editorial acumen, and so on.

It soon appeared that none of this was to come about. For one thing, although the publishing house—which had prospered largely through textbooks and industrial manuals and dozens of technical journals in fields as varied and arcane as pig husbandry and mortuary science and extruded plastics—did publish novels and non-fiction as a sideline, thereby requiring the labor of junior aestheticians like myself, its list of authors would scarcely capture the attention of anyone seriously concerned with literature. At the time I arrived, for example, the two most prominent writers being promoted were a retired World War II fleet admiral and an exceptionally flyblown ex-Communist stool pigeon whose ghostwritten mea culpa was doing middling well on the best-seller lists. Of an author of the stature of John O’Hara (although I had far more illustrious literary idols, O’Hara represented for me the kind of writer a young editor might go out and get drunk with) there was no trace. Furthermore, there was the depressing matter of the work to which I had been assigned. At that time McGraw-Hill & Company (for such was my employer’s name) lacked any literary éclat, having for so long and successfully purveyed its hulking works of technology that the small trade-book house in which I labored, and which aspired to the excellence of Scribner or Knopf, was considered something of a joke in the business. It was a little as if a vast huckstering organization like Montgomery Ward or Masters had had the effrontery to set up an intimate salon dealing in mink and chinchilla that everyone in the trade knew were dyed beaver from Japan.

So in my capacity as the lowest drudge in the office hierarchy I not only was denied the opportunity to read manuscripts even of passing merit, but was forced to plow my way daily through fiction and non-fiction of the humblest possible quality—coffee-stained and thumb-smeared stacks of Hammerhill Bond whose used, ravaged appearance proclaimed at once their author’s (or agent’s) terrible desperation and McGraw-Hill’s function as publisher of last resort. But at my age, with a snootful of English Lit. that made me as savagely demanding as Matthew Arnold in my insistence that the written word exemplify only the highest seriousness and truth, I treated these forlorn offspring of a thousand strangers’ lonely and fragile desire with the magisterial, abstract loathing of an ape plucking vermin from his pelt. I was adamant, cutting, remorseless, insufferable. High in my glassed-in cubbyhole on the twentieth floor of the McGraw-Hill Building—an architecturally impressive but spiritually enervating green tower on West Forty-second Street—I leveled the scorn that could only be mustered by one who had just finished reading Seven Types of Ambiguity upon these sad outpourings piled high on my desk, all of them so freighted with hope and clubfooted syntax. I was required to write a reasonably full description of each submission, no matter how bad the book. At first it was a lark and I honestly enjoyed the bitchery and vengeance I was able to wreak upon these manuscripts. But after a time their unrelenting mediocrity palled, and I became weary of the sameness of the job, weary too of chain-smoking and the smog-shrouded view of Manhattan, and of pecking out such callous reader’s reports as the following, which I have salvaged intact from that dry and dispiriting time. I quote them verbatim, without gloss.

Tall Grows the Eelgrass, by Edmonia Kraus Biersticker. Fiction.

Love and death amid the sand dunes and cranberry bogs of southern New Jersey. The young hero, Willard Strathaway, heir to a large cranberry-packing fortune and a recent graduate of Princeton University, falls wildly in love with Ramona Blaine, daughter of Ezra Blaine, an old-time leftist and leader of a strike among the cranberry harvesters. The plot is cute and complex, having largely to do with an alleged conspiracy on the part of Brandon Strathaway—Willard’s tycoon father—to dispose of old Ezra, whose hideously mutilated corpse is indeed found one morning in the entrails of a mechanical cranberry picker. This leads to nearly terminal recriminations between Willard—described as having “a marvelous Princetonian tilt to his head, besides a considerable feline grace”—and the bereaved Ramona, “her slender lissomeness barely concealing the full voluptuous surge which lurked beneath.”

Utterly aghast even as I write, I can only say that this may be the worst novel ever penned by woman or beast. Decline with all possible speed.

Oh, clever, supercilious young man! How I gloated and chuckled as I eviscerated these helpless, underprivileged, subliterary lambkins. Nor was I fearful of giving a gentle dig in the ribs at McGraw-Hill and its penchant for publishing trashy “fun” books which could be excerpted in places like Reader’s Digest for a hefty advance (though my japery may have contributed to my downfall).

The Plumber’s Wench, by Audrey Wainwright Smilie. Non-fiction.

The only thing going for this book is its title, which is catchy and vulgar enough to be right down McGraw-Hill’s alley. The author is an actual woman, married—as the title coyly indicates—to a plumber living in a suburb of Worcester, Mass. Hopelessly unfunny, though straining for laughs on every page, these illiterate daydreams are an attempt to romanticize what must be a ghastly existence, the author eagerly equating the comic vicissitudes of her domestic life with those in the household of a brain surgeon. Like a physician, she points out, a plumber is on call day and night; like that of a physician the work of a plumber is quite intricate and involves exposure to germs; and both often come home smelling badly. The chapter headings best demonstrate the quality of the humor, which is too feeble even to be described properly as scatological: “Rub-a-Dub-Dub, the Blonde in the Tub.” “A Drain on the Nerves…

The foregoing is excerpted from Sophie’s Choice by William Styron. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc.

Fragile Things
by Neil Gaiman

Description:
A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night, taking one of the spectators along with it . . .

In a novella set two years after the events of American Gods, Shadow pays a visit to an ancient Scottish mansion, and finds himself trapped in a game of murder and monsters . . .

In a Hugo Award-winning short story set in a strangely altered Victorian England, the great detective Sherlock Holmes must solve a most unsettling royal murder . . .

Two teenage boys crash a party and meet the girls of their dreams—and nightmares . . .

In a Locus Award-winning tale, the members of an excusive epicurean club lament that they’ve eaten everything that can be eaten, with the exception of a legendary, rare, and exceedingly dangerous Egyptian bird . . .

Such marvelous creations and more—including a short story set in the world of The Matrix, and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children’s fiction—can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman’s storytelling brilliance as well as his terrifyingly entertaining dark sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most unique writers of our time.

About the Author:
Neil Gaiman is the critically acclaimed and award-winning creator of the Sandman series of graphic novels, author of the novels Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, and Neverwhere, the short-fiction collection Smoke and Mirrors, and the bestselling children’s books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls (both illustrated by Dave McKean). Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.

Excerpt:

Chapter One - A Study in Emerald

I. The New Friend

Fresh from Their Stupendous European Tour, where they performed before several of the crowned heads of Europe, garnering their plaudits and praise with magnificent dramatic performances, combining both comedy and tragedy, the Strand Players wish to make it known that they shall be appearing at the Royal Court Theatre, Drury Lane, for a limited engagement in April, at which they will present My Look Alike Brother Tom!, The Littlest Violet Seller and The Great Old Ones Come (this last an Historical Epic of Pageantry and Delight); each an entire play in one act! Tickets are available now from the Box Office.

It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.

But I am woolgathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.

I had been in need of lodgings. That was how I met him. I wanted someone to share the cost of rooms with me. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, in the chemical laboratories of St. Bart’s. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide.

“Astonishing,” I said.

“Not really,” said the stranger in the white lab coat, who was to become my friend. “From the way you hold your arm, I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way. You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing, and there are few enough places in the Empire that a military man can be both tanned and, given the nature of the injury to your shoulder and the traditions of the Afghan cave folk, tortured.”

Put like that, of course, it was absurdly simple. But then, it always was. I had been tanned nut brown. And I had indeed, as he had observed, been tortured.

The gods and men of Afghanistan were savages, unwilling to be ruled from Whitehall or from Berlin or even from Moscow, and unprepared to see reason. I had been sent into those hills, attached to the—th Regiment. As long as the fighting remained in the hills and mountains, we fought on an equal footing. When the skirmishes descended into the caves and the darkness then we found ourselves, as it were, out of our depth and in over our heads.

I shall not forget the mirrored surface of the underground lake, nor the thing that emerged from the lake, its eyes opening and closing, and the singing whispers that accompanied it as it rose, wreathing their way about it like the buzzing of flies bigger than worlds.

That I survived was a miracle, but survive I did, and I returned to England with my nerves in shreds and tatters. The place that leech like mouth had touched me was tattooed forever, frog white, into the skin of my now withered shoulder. I had once been a crack shot. Now I had nothing, save a fear of the world beneath the world akin to panic, which meant that I would gladly pay sixpence of my army pension for a Hansom cab rather than a penny to travel underground.

Still, the fogs and darknesses of London comforted me, took me in. I had lost my first lodgings because I screamed in the night. I had been in Afghanistan; I was there no longer.

“I scream in the night,” I told him.

“I have been told that I snore,” he said. “Also I keep irregular hours, and I often use the mantelpiece for target practice. I will need the sitting room to meet clients. I am selfish, private, and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”

I smiled, and I shook my head, and extended my hand. We shook on it.

The rooms he had found for us, in Baker Street, were more than adequate for two bachelors. I bore in mind all my friend had said about his desire for privacy, and I forbore from asking what it was he did for a living. Still, there was much to pique my curiosity. Visitors would arrive at all hours, and when they did I would leave the sitting room and repair to my bedroom, pondering what they could have in common with my friend: the pale woman with one eye bone white, the small man who looked like a commercial traveler, the portly dandy in his velvet jacket, and the rest. Some were frequent visitors, many others came only once, spoke to him, and left, looking troubled or looking satisfied.

He was a mystery to me.

We were partaking of one of our landlady’s magnificent breakfasts one morning, when my friend rang the bell to summon that good lady. “There will be a gentleman joining us, in about four minutes,” he said. “We will need another place at table.”

“Very good,” she said, “I’ll put more sausages under the grill.”

My friend returned to perusing his morning paper. I waited for an explanation with growing impatience. Finally, I could stand it no longer. “I don’t understand. How could you know that in four minutes we would be receiving a visitor? There was no telegram, no message of any kind.”

He smiled, thinly. “You did not hear the clatter of a brougham several minutes ago? It slowed as it passed us—obviously as the driver identified our door, then it sped up and went past, up into the Marylebone Road. There is a crush of carriages and taxicabs letting off passengers at the railway station and at the waxworks, and it is in that crush that anyone wishing to alight without being observed will go. The walk from there to here is but four minutes.. . .”

He glanced at his pocket watch, and as he did so I heard a tread on the stairs outside.

“Come in, Lestrade,” he called. “The door is ajar, and your sausages are just coming out from under the grill.”

The foregoing is excerpted from Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

Popular Japanese storyteller Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Woodk, Wind-up Bird Chronicle) was recently awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, given annually through the cooperation of the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague, Czech Republic. Kafka is said to be a favorite of Murakami since he first read the Czech author’s works as a teenager. Murakami named the leading character of his novel Kafka on the Shore after Franz Kafka to honor him.

According to the organizers, the award is given to authors whose works exhibit “humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, existential, timeless character, generally human validity and ability to hand over a testimony about our times.” Past winners of the award have also received the Nobel Prize for Literature and Murakami has also been said to be a likely candidate for the prestigious prize.

Recently released:

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
by Haruki Murakami

Description:
Following the best-selling triumph of Kafka on the Shore comes a collection that generously expresses Murakami’s mastery. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining.

Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be the closest of all.
About the Author

About the author:
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into thirty-eight languages, and the most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.

Murakami likes unagi, Smirnoff Vodka, and Radiohead. Learn more about the author from his website.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl

Description:
Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs), Blue is clever, deadpan, and possessed of a vast lexicon of literary, political, philosophical, and scientific knowledge—and is quite the cineaste to boot. In her final year of high school at the elite (and unusual) St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, Blue falls in with a charismatic group of friends and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. But when the drowning of one of Hannah’s friends and the shocking death of Hannah herself lead to a confluence of mysteries, Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instincts and cultural references to guide—or misguide—her.

Structured around a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class and containing ironic visual aids (drawn by the author), Pessl’s debut novel is complex yet compelling, erudite yet accessible. It combines the suspense of Hitchcock, the self-parody of Dave Eggers, and the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt with a dazzling intelligence and wit entirely Pessl’s own.

About the Author:
Marisha Pessl graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University.

A book club reading guide is available from the publisher.

Based on the Steven Spielberg animated movie.  Includes 3-D poster and glasses.

Attack of the Monster House in 3-D!
by Lara Bergen

Description:
In order to destroy the Monster House, DJ and his friends need some questions answered. So, they set off to talk to an expert on ghosts, demons, and the paranormal, the wisest pizza-delivery guy on earth, known to all as Skull. The wise Skull tells them that the only way to kill the Monster House is to strike it at the source of life: its heart.

But can the kids strike the beast’s heart and still manage to get out of the house alive? Find out in this spooky 3-D story with 3-D poster and glasses!