Books:

"Men Without Women" by Haruki Murakami

“Men Without Women,” the latest installment of fiction from Haruki Murakami’s wonderfully weird imagination, arrives at a time when a title like that can ignite a Twitter war. Throw in the fact that Murakami, who has always paid eager tribute to his inspirations and enthusiasms, has lifted his title from the legendary story collection that established Ernest Hemingway’s great-white-macho-male reputation, and you might wonder if this book will offer up Murakami’s version of mansplaining — if it might, even, contain a not so veiled meditation on the lonely domestic life of a president whose wife has so far refused to live with him. At the risk of disappointing the culture police, “Men Without Women” is neither of these things.

"Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" by Haruki Murakami

Murakami has successfully gotten a collection of short stories to coalesce before. His last book of short stories to be published in English was the slim, thematically connected after the quake, consisting of just six stories connected to the 1995 Kobe Earthquake. Despite their thematic unity, these stories cover a range of styles and emotions, from the fantastic (“Superfrog Saves Tokyo”) to realist love (“Honey Pie”). Murakami’s new collection, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, is completely different. It is a big book: twenty-five stories written over the course of twenty-five years, from 1980 to 2005. Throughout his career, Murakami has struck certain themes again and again (see the Murakami Dictionary for some examples), and many of them are here. Readers of Murakami can expect to find the hopeless love, the alienation, the weird events that seem to grow out of the characters’ psychological holes. Yet the stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman also bring out certain themes that are less visible when viewing Murakami’s work as a whole.

"Men Without Women" by Ernest Hemingway

o it is a warm gratification to find the new Hemingway book, Men Without Women, a truly magnificent work. It is composed of thirteen short stories, most of which have been published before. They are sad and terrible stories; the author’s enormous appetite for life seems to have been somehow appeased. You find here little of that peaceful ecstasy that marked the camping trip in The Sun Also Rises and the lone fisherman’s days in Big Two-Hearted River, in In Our Time. The stories include “The Killers,” which seems to me one of the four great American short stories. (All you have to do is drop the nearest hat, and I’ll tell you what I think the others are. They are Wilbur Daniel Steele’s “Blue Murder,” Sherwood Anderson’s “I’m a Fool,” and Ring Lardner’s “Some Like Them Cold”....) The book also includes “Fifty Grand,” “In Another Country,” and the delicate and tragic “Hills Like White Elephants.” I do not know where a greater collection of stories can be found.

- by Dorothy Parker

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