Leon Neyfakh talks to former Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson, who says, "I think these people are rock stars, I always did... I think they're cool. I'm much more interested in hearing about what's going on in Sonny Mehta's head than I am in George Clooney's."

Plus: Martin Schaedel... The Dawn of Post-Journalism... Ravelry.com.

This was Friday afternoon, and Ms. Nelson, 52, was in her office at Publishers Weekly, where until the end of last week she was editor in chief. Surrounded by boxes of books that she’d been packing since being told the previous Monday morning that she was being laid off, Ms. Nelson was battling an unforgiving cold, sneezing and sniffling emphatically.

She talked about how much she loves the book business. After nine years on the beat—four of them as editor of PW—she speaks of her subjects with warmth, and describes their sorrows as if they were her own.

“There’s so much written about how publishers don’t know what they’re doing,” Ms. Nelson said. “But how do you know what to do? You’re making a bet on who’s gonna like something a year and a half from now. That’s without even getting into the economy or anything—just, ‘What’s the mood of a number of people going to be a year and a half from now?’ If you thought too much about that, you’d shoot yourself.”

People in the book business don’t tend to go to such extremes, she said, as most of them can’t give up the rush they get when they discover a new work and put it out into the world.

“That’s the thing about the book business,” she said. “You know, things are terrible, but there are not a lot of highs—legal highs!—that match that feeling when someone reads a book that they fall in love with. I mean, it is like falling in love—it’s like the world becomes a beautiful place. I really think that that’s what happens. And if you happened to fall in love with something, you thought it was a great week, even though 70,000 people lost their jobs.”

As even the sleepiest observers know by now, the last few months have been bleak ones for the publishing industry. Lots of layoffs, for one thing. Also, fewer book deals being done and fewer books being sold. Two of the oldest publishing houses in the country slaughtered by careless owners. And so on. Ms. Nelson, in her widely read and much-discussed weekly PW column, has tried to stay positive, acknowledging the trouble but never failing to sound notes of optimism and reassurance. Take, for example, her Dec. 15 column titled “The Biz Is Alright,” in which she implored her readers (“the walking wounded”) to draw strength from one another: 

“I know it sounds hokey—and I will spare you the Chinese proverb about every crisis being an opportunity—but while the mood in BookLand is decidedly tense, it’s a tension tinged with community and compassion.”

Ms. Nelson’s insistence on seeing the bright side week after week provoked some critics to say she had come to identify too strongly with her subjects in the industry, either because they had become her friends over the years or because her magazine depended on their advertising.

Ms. Nelson bristled Friday at the notion that her optimism in recent months was insincere.

“I mean, how do I say this? It is sort of my way—it’s sort of true to my personality to be that way,” she said. “So it’s not like I was really going around growling, and then writing these kind of sunny things. First of all, I don’t think they were so sunny, really, but it is true to my personality to make a joke or try to figure out where the good news is in the story. I think [my columns] were true to what I was feeling, but I’m a little bit that way.”

IF MS. NELSON is sensitive on this point, it’s probably because for all the cheerleading she has done from her perch atop PW, she retains the guts and inclinations of a reporter who, before taking over the industry bible, spent five years—first at Inside.com, then the New York Observer and, finally, the New York Post—hunting from the outside for insider gossip, million-dollar book deals and dramatic job moves.

It was at Inside.com—which folded in 2001, just a few years after its launch, but not before introducing a number of formal innovations that are now standard in online journalism—that Ms. Nelson first got her legs as a business reporter. Prior to her start there, she was mainly freelancing and editing for women’s magazines and writing book reviews.

“I got [the Inside.com job] and I was scared to death,” Ms. Nelson said. “I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t how to report a story, and I was reporting for this thing that no one had ever heard of because it didn’t exist yet. And I was with all these guys who were all from The Wall Street Journal and Spin magazine, and I was, you know, the girl in the corner writing about the book business.”

New York Times media columnist David Carr, who was hired at Inside.com a few months after Ms. Nelson was, remembered an obsessively competitive reporter whose taste for scoops matched the uncommonly speedy metabolism that Inside.com was aiming for. 

“We were both smokers, and it would be 10:30 in the morning—we would have already filed—and we’d both be outside scuffing the ground and saying, ‘I’ve got nothing,’” Mr. Carr said. “You never saw a more hard-core competitive journalist than Sara Nelson. Freakish. Freakish. She would see something come up on her screen and just explode.”

Mr. Carr went on: “She was the rare trade reporter who could write and think and who could do real-time analytics. And so she took full advantage of the platform in terms of breaking a lot of news, and doing it so it was clear not just what happened but why.”

“We used to report auctions in real time at Inside,” Ms. Nelson said. “We’d put up a story, you know, ‘Ann Godoff is up to $200,000! This one’s up to 300!” It was like a horse race. You know, ‘… Aaaand coming around the corner is …’ It was fun, but also it was new—nobody else had ever done it.”

Predictably, Ms. Nelson said, she saw the publishing industry from a rather different light as editor of PW than she had as a beat reporter. Among other things, she noticed for the first time a hostility from the outside world directed towards editors, agents and all the rest of her people—a creepy chorus of eager detractors who snarled with glee whenever someone in the industry screwed up. The controversy around James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, she said, is what set it off: “It opened the floodgates for people to say, ‘It’s all publishing’s fault! They’re all a bunch of insiders who scratch each other’s backs and don’t check their facts and keep the rest of us out and think they’re better than us!’”

This vinegary sort of scolding initially stunned Ms. Nelson (“I was like, what?”), but in the years since she has developed a clearer theory of where the vitriol comes from.

“I think it’s because many, many, many, many people think they can write and that they have a book in them,” she said. “And they are very, very resentful of someone else who has a book come out. … I think everybody thinks that there but for the luck of knowing a New York editor goes their memoir.”

One of her ambitions when she took over PW and initiated a major redesign of its look and contents was to draw some of these people into the magazine’s audience, and show them that in fact they could participate in the book business as well as any so-called insider. “It used to be that every writer, either published or who just wanted to be published, felt they had to have a subscription to PW,” she said at the time in an interview with Media Bistro. “They felt that it had information that they needed, and I think that some of that has fallen off.”

One of the ways she tried to reverse that trend was by diluting the “nuts and bolts, hard-core information” that people in the business needed to do their jobs with columns and features that might not normally appear in a trade publication.

“I wanted to make it more of a magazine that I wanted to read, and I’d come out of consumer magazines and women’s magazines,” Ms. Nelson said. “There were things I specifically stole from Lucky, for example. … I just thought, like, ‘This is not enough fun, and it should be more fun.’”

So she turned it into a more popular magazine—one that included not only the data, trend analysis and deal reports that the core audience relied on it for, but also columns and features that were accessible to relative outsiders. “It’s not quite stage-door Johnnys, but it’s some version of that,” Ms. Nelson said, referring to the readers she hoped to attract. “You know, people who kind of want to know who’s publishing what because they’re writing a book, or they know someone who’s writing a book. We have many more of those readers than they had in the previous regime.”

On Friday evening, in between saying goodbye to one staffer after another—not kissing any of them because of that dreadful cold, and warning each of them that she’d be in over the weekend cleaning up her office—Ms. Nelson said she wasn’t sure what her next move would be, but that she hoped she might stay connected to the book world.

“To me, it’s like the most fabulous thing, to hang around with a bunch of editors,” she said. “It was a big part of my job. … I loved that part of my job. I will miss that part, though I’m hoping to have a new place to put my column or blog soon, and I hope I will do a fair amount of hanging around when I do that.”

Whatever it is, she added, “it’s hard for me to imagine that it won’t be somehow connected to writing and the arts. I’m probably not going to go learn how to be a dance reporter—I don’t know that much about dance—but fashion, I would go and learn how to report on that. Or, you know, music. Not that any of these are growth industries! I don’t know. This had seemed like such a perfect job—like my whole life had been coming towards having this job, and now I’ve had it.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

Over the course of her four years at Publishers Weekly, Ms. Nelson has come to serve as something of a den mother for an industry that, on its worst days, seems to be crumbling. Her ubiquity on panels dedicated to the future of books and her largely unflappable public optimism about the health of the business has made her one of publishing's most visible cheerleaders.

The restructuring comes several months after Reed Elsevier, which owns RBI and has been trying to sell it since last February, reportedly lowered the price tag for the property to less than $1 billion dollars—just half of its initial asking price. At the time, Bloomberg reported that Reed CEO Crispin Davis would "either cancel the sale of Reed Business Information"—which is made up of about 400 magazines, including Variety—"or choose a bidder for final talks in coming weeks." In December, word came that Reed, having "judged it not possible to structure a transaction on acceptable terms," had "terminated discussions with potential bidders." 

What Ms. Nelson's firing means for the future of Publishers Weekly is unclear. Attempts to contact people at the magazine (including a call to Ms. Nelson) have so far gone unreturned.

Salina Le Bris, a corporate spokeswoman for Reed Elsevior, declined to comment, referring all questions to the short statement issued by the company earlier today. That statement did not mention specifically the elimination of Ms. Nelson's position or give any indication as to whether she would be replaced.

In what may be her final column for Publishers Weekly, which came out this morning, Ms. Nelson sounded a message of hope for the future: "We have to keep doing what we do," she wrote. "We may need to change the format or the frequency or the style of what we publish, but people will not stop publishing or reading, no matter what. We have to keep finding new ways to reach the thousands of people who feel the same way we do. Book people are book people are book people, after all—and no amount of recession or depression or worry will ever change that fact."

UPDATE: According to a memo sent to staff this afternoon by Ron Shanks, who oversees the four publications at RBI that deal with the book business, Ms. Nelson’s duties will be taken over by Brian Kenney, currently the editor of School Library Journal.  

Mr. Kenney is being promoted to editorial director of the entire publishing group, which also includes Publishers Weekly, Library Hotline, Library Journal, and its Spanish-language iteration Criticas.  

According to the memo, Mr. Kenney will retain “day-to-day management of School Library Journal, as well as oversight of Library Journal and Publishers Weekly editorial strategy, staffing and execution.”  

One wonders what kind of execution is meant. 

In her column this week, Ms. Nelson implores her readers to look on the bright side of the recent "grimness," and to draw strength from the feeling of common cause that she thinks has resulted from it:

The "walking wounded"! A phrase which according to Wikipedia officially refers to "injured persons who are of a relatively low priority" because they are "conscious and breathing and usually have only (relatively) minor injuries." Oy! Can one help but think of John Homans, who wrote in New York Magazine on Sept. 24, 2001 of a wounded city in which "The smallest daily exchanges have been characterized by compulsive door-holding ('No, after you') and exaggerated politeness"?

Ms. Nelson, who five years ago served as the publishing columnist at The Observer, noted in her piece that even the people at Hachette Book Group, who get a week's extra pay this year thanks to the blockbuster success of the new Stephanie Meyer book, have suspended their competitive urges and adopted an appropriately somber spirit that calls to mind nothing so much as survivor's guilt.

Even if January and February prove as devastating sales-wise (as some fear), Ms. Nelson wrote, "at least we're doing our best to shore up and stay in the business we've chosen—and to remember why we chose it in the first place: because it's about books, because they're important and because we love them, and for the most part, we like each other."

"All of us," she concluded, "even those houses and executives of whom we can't help being jealous right now, are all in this together."

A “starred review” is a prize—a guarantee, almost, that booksellers, librarians, and book editors across the country will all take a look at a title when they get the galley in the mail. No guarantee that they’ll go for it—not even editor-in-chief Sara Nelson would ever argue that PW unilaterally sets the tone for a book’s reception—but in a field as crowded as this one, a mere look is a valuable thing.

Thus the reviewers of PW, who do not get bylines, have spoken as one as if from behind a drape for the past 136 years, their authority drawn from the classic (if not a bit fossilized!) PW brand and reinforced by the anonymity they are afforded by the magazine’s no-bylines policy.

All that changed when PW announced to contributors this spring that the freelance rate was being cut by 50 percent, and that henceforth they would be paid only $25 per review. To make up for the cut, reviewers were told they would be “be credited as a contributor” in issues where their reviews ran.

And so an unfamiliar box appeared in the magazine. With this box, a little bit of PW tradition went to its grave, and the mystique of that booming PW voice, once so objective and authoritative, fractured and finally shattered by the 80-something names printed there in red ink, each referring to an individual, a person somewhere who read a book and wrote a review of it.

Who are these individuals? Enthusiasts, mainly. Schoolteachers, professors, stay-at-home moms, authors. It takes all kinds. We looked a handful of them up on Google, corresponded with a couple, and came up with some crude bios. Here's an assortment.

Anna Dembska—Composer. Has worked as a soprano and an improvisor. From the official bio: “She has produced and performed her original theater works, operas, and music since 1976—from Enough is Enough, a puppet opera, at the Bread and Puppet Circus, to Coyote at The Bang-on-a-Can Festival at Lincoln Center.” Also: Ms. Dembska sings in a Maine-based quartet called “Singin’ Local.”

Pete Croatto—Movie critic. Loves Hoosiers and Planes Trains and Automobiles. Hated Date Movie and Baby Geniuses 2.

Bhob Stewart—Publisher of 1953's EC Fan Bulletin, the original EC fanzine. Editor of The MAD Style Guide, author of Wallace Wood biography Against the Grain, and a writer for 80's animated series Kissyfur. Acting credits include the legendary Venus in Furs and Warhol's Naomi's Birthday Party.

Kate Axelrod—Graduated from Oberlin last summer, then completed the six-week Columbia Publishing Course.

Naomi Woronov—Author of Modern American English: Living and Learning in the West, published in 1983 by the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. This book sold nearly two million copies in China. The University of Chicago Magazine declares: “A whole generation of Chinese learned to speak and understand English from this text.”

Charlene Brusso—According to Ms. Brusso’s bio, she has “worked as an archaeologist, an astronomer, a baker, an editor, a museum curator's assistant, a janitor, a tutor, a physicist, and a scientific programmer.” Her focus is in science. She “[specializes] in physics, astronomy, planetary science and geology, and history of science.” She is also a science fiction/fantasy author.

Libby Morse—University of Chicago graduate, now a senior advertising and marketing exec at Lipman Hearne. Reviews children's books.

Will Boisvert—Spent a few years reviewing books for Entertainment Weekly. At one point was a contributing editor at the magazine In These Times, where he filed excellent pieces about the 2004 Republican National Convention, the culture of “insiderism,” and Francis Fukayama and biotechnology.

Nathalie op de Beeck—Assistant professor in the English department at Illinois State University, where she specializes in children's literature and childhood studies, visual studies, and critical theory.

Liam Brennen—This one directly from the man himself, via email: “Well, I'm a 24 year old writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, having graduated just over a year ago with an English degree from the University of Manitoba. I started out writing for my student paper, covering Arts news and reviews and then managed to get a freelance job with the Winnipeg Free Press writing book reviews. In truth I hadn't actually heard of PW until I started reviewing really, and one day I noticed the review quote on the back cover of an old Stephen King book I was reading and thought that somehow I might be able to be the one who writes those! So I looked them up and within a couple of days I was reviewing for the fiction department. Shortly after that I got a job reviewing audiobooks (which is where I spend most of my time now) with PW and have since become a top reviewer in that section. And I suppose that's about it!”

Sue Corbett—Grew up in New York. Parents Irish immigrants. Started her career as a reporter, eventually settling on a job at The Miami Herald. She started reviewing children’s books there in 1996. A regular contributor to People, and a young-adult novelist as well.

Lance Eaton—Has an ambiguous Web site which he has been maintaining since 1999. Believes that “despite how much we tell ourselves that we are independent and free-thinking people, we rarely can escape the paradigm of the world around us.” In the throes of a research project about consumerism, consumption, and media. “I want to record and account for all the things I buy, consume, eat, and waste throughout the year to get a sense of what kind of spoke I am in the wheel of life.” The Way-Back Machine tells us that he may have pioneered Twitter, as well as blogging.

Dick Adler—70 or 71 years old. Reviews mysteries—the American Crime Writers League gave him a prize recognizing his excellence in mystery-fiction reviewing. Began his career in 1956 at a men’s magazine called Argosy. During the seventies, wrote for TV Guide. Member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Rachel Bravvman—Has written book reviews for Seattle Magazine and Bust. Also for a magazine geared towards people who have bipolar disorder and their friends and family. She is a consultant/grant writer, also. She writes in an e-mail: “My love of the written word is as deep as my respect for it. I'm impassioned by the way writing can transform the world around us- how language is able to shape thoughts, moods and actions. How in a split second, a string of syllables can instigate change. “I bring a reverence and facility for words to every project I undertake assuring that each communique is an innovation.”

Kate Pavao—Graduated from The University of California at Santa Cruz with a degree in women’s studies, then went to journalism school at Columbia. Was once an assistant editor at Teen People. Also editorial director
of chiccklick.com.

Ron Hogan—The editor of Galleycat, a Mediabistro blog about the publishing industry.

Sheri Melnick—Based in Enola, Penn. According to her Web site, a non-practicing lawyer and “stay-at-home mom of four children.” Two of these four are twins. Ms. Melnick also writes reviews books for Romantic Times, which is narrowly dedicated to romance, mystery, and women’s fiction.

Saul Austerlitz—A 29-year-old from Brooklyn, author of Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes. 

Ellen Wernecke—A recent graduate of Brown University, where she wrote for the Brown Daily Herald. Has also contributed to The Onion's AV Club section. Didn’t get along with her freshman year roommate, according to a testimonal posted on a peer-review Web site. UPDATE: Initially we thought Ms. Wernecke was editor-in-chief of the BDH--what other conclusion to draw from this!--but people who went to school there tell us it's not so, "although she would have been good at it."

Adam Boretz—Second year M.F.A. at Columbia specializing in fiction as of spring 2007. Occupation on flickr listed as "Procrastinator." Favorite books and authors: George Saunders, Denis Johnson, John Irving, David Foster Wallace. Favorite movies: Zombie Movies, Fight Club, Fear and Loathing, Hedwig, Spinal Tap.

Roger Gathman—Lives in Austin, Tex. Edits (edited, by the looks of it) a Webzine called Calumny and Art. Studied philosophy in graduate school. Had a column in The Austin American-Statesman: “The Academic Presses,” which was praised by Scott McLemee for carrying the torch of the dearly missed review of academic life Lingua Franca.

William D. Bushnell—Lives in Maine. According to the Maine Humanities Council, Mr. Bushnell has published more than 1,350 pieces in “thirty magazines and newspapers including Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Civil War Times, Military Officer Magazine and many others.” National Book Critics' Circle member; teaches or taught a class on book reviewing at the University of Southern Maine.

Sherwood Smith—Specialty is sci-fi and fantasy that borders on young-adult. Ms. Smith has written dozens of books in this genre. Has an official Web site featuring an FAQ section where the first “Q” is “Are there any more stories about Mel and Vidanric?”

The Bookseller reports:

During a conference call, Mr. Davis reportedly told analysts that there is no particular buyer in mind. "We do think there will be a wide and strong level of interest in this business both from strategic and private equity buyers, we are very open minded on who and when," he said. 

According to Reuters, Reed's bundle of magazines could fetch $2 billion.

Millard Kaufman's Bowl of Cherries, designed by McSweeney's M.E. Eli Horowitz, gets a mention, as does Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. Rebecca Mead's One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, designed by Evan Gaffney, gets called "perfect," while Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, designed by Pete Garceau, gets "ignorable."

The rest here.

As of this afternoon, New York is in the lead. Clearly, those mid-western bookstore owners are voting in droves, because no one in New York – the center of book publishing and book-related media – likes to have Book Expo here. The Javits Center? Ew. Plus, when you live in New York, you can’t get your employer to put you up in a hotel. Similarly, you can’t as easily invite that nubile young assistant publicist home with you, when home is a dumpy room in a nasty Bushwick railroad instead of a King suite at the Loews.

Consider this a rallying call: New York publishing folk, don’t let BEA take up here permanently. Go vote for Los Angeles, or Chicago. Even DC is better than here! Anything so we can go back to ordering room service and taking cabs on someone else’s dime. Our apartment doesn’t even have the contents of a mini-bar.

Many of the stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are structured around a character’s lucid recollection of a strange or vivid incident from his or her past. A young man thinks back on the bizarre daydreams of a hospitalized classmate in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”; a girl remembers a mysterious run-in with a restaurant owner on her 20th birthday in “Birthday Girl”; a young man recalls a haunting night spent as a watchman in “The Mirror”; the narrator’s polyamorous friend tells of a 40-day spell when he was visited by daily vomiting and punctual prank phone calls in “Nausea 1979.” A story called “A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism” is about the unexpected adult confessions of one man’s boyhood all-star classmate, and “The Seventh Man” is about another storyteller’s childhood brush with a typhoon. In each case the notable episode defies explanation, and the reader is led to believe that it’s precisely the lack of resolution that has spurred the retelling.

Paired with scattered references to the meaning of storytelling, the repeated narrative device of framing a story within a story also lends the collection as a whole a mood of literary/philosophical inquiry. “The Mirror” begins: “All the stories you’ve been telling tonight seem to fall into two categories,” and the opening of “The Seventh Man” announces that the speaker was “the last one to tell his story that night.” The opening paragraphs of “The Year of Spaghetti” include the explanatory line, “This is a story from the Year of Spaghetti, 1971 A.D.,” and near the end of “Nausea 1979,” the storyteller tells the narrator, “I guess that’s why you’re a writer and I’m not.” In a particularly flagrant display of writerly self-consciousness, “Chance Traveler” opens: “The ‘I’ here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of the story.” Mr. Murakami wisely uses these touches of metafictional speculation only sparingly; he trusts that the utter originality of his stories itself is enough to hold his readers.

And, as usual, it does. Mr. Murakami possesses a unique talent for fusing stark realism with unfettered imaginings. In this passage, from in “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story,” a man waits for his lover to give him an answer: “With her back to me, she allowed her slender fingers to trail in the water. It seemed as if my question were coursing through her fingers to be conducted to the ruined city beneath the water. It’s still down there, I’m sure, the question mark glittering at the bottom of the pond like a polished metal fragment. For all I know, it’s showering the cola cans around it with that same question.”

If Mr. Murakami’s novels tend towards somber reflections on mortality and the tragedy of life’s inherent uncontrollability, in his short stories, it’s more often a bittersweet zest for life—here, life at its most fantastic, unpredictable and otherworldly—that triumphs. Sections from “Man-Eating Cats,” for instance, reveal a softer and more whimsical version of passages from Sputnik Sweetheart (2001). In the novel, we get an exchange between a young woman and young man caught in a love triangle: The young man lusts after the young woman, who’s in the grip of an urgent, unrequited love for an older women. These thwarted passions give a newspaper account of the man-eating cats found in a dead woman’s apartment a dark absurdity. In the story, the same anecdote is shared between vacationing lovers, and the whole episode takes on a fresh levity.

“A Shinagawa Monkey” is another story that manages to tackle serious themes in a light-hearted way. The story opens with a young married woman noticing that “recently she’d had trouble remembering her own name.” Unable to find an explanation for these mysterious lapses of memory, and dissatisfied with the temporary solution of engraving her name on a charm bracelet, Mizuki Ando seeks the help of a tiny counseling center, which after several sessions tracks down a mischievous Shinagawa monkey lurking in sewers, waiting for the opportunity to snatch away names.

“I’m a monkey who takes people’s names,” the Shinagawa monkey tells Mizuki. “It’s a sickness I suffer from. Once I spot a name I can’t help myself.” The encounter proves profoundly life-changing: The monkey is able to tell Mizuki the things that have “stuck” to her name, and the truth is nothing short of devastating. “Your mother doesn’t love you. She’s never loved you,” says the Shinagawa monkey, and “you don’t truly love your husband.” That the entire episode manages to be both genuinely cathartic and delightfully fanciful is a testament to Mr. Murakami’s gift as a storyteller.

For Mr. Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the product of insuppressible and spontaneous—as opposed to more deliberate, disciplined—expression. Some of the stories in this collection were written in the early 1980’s, but most of them date from 2005, when Mr. Murakami, inspired by a “powerful urge,” went on a story-writing binge: He wrote five in about a month, then churned out several more. Perhaps the strength of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (which recently won the $45,000 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award) ultimately derives from the fact that Haruki Murakami, as he notes in his introduction, finds “writing novels a challenge [and] writing short stories a joy.” As the Shinagawa monkey says of his own vocation, “It’s what I do.”

Mythili Rao is a graduate student in English and American literature at N.Y.U. and a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.