Pravesh Bhardwaj read and and shared 304 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2020. Here are his favorites.
Haruki Murakami
Japan: A Longform Reading List of Longform Writing
Armchair travel is more important than ever, now that pandemic has forced us to stay indoors. Reading can take you across the ocean.
Haruki Murakami Strolls Through His Childhood Home After the Hanshin Earthquake
When Haruki Murakami walked the long distance between his childhood home outside Kobe and the city center, he found a city changed by the great Kobe earthquake, and the constant spector of violence.
Haruki Murakami’s Advice to Young Writers
In the essay “So What Shall I Write About?” from Monkey Business magazine, Haruki Murakami gives readers a glimpse into his creative process and how to become a novelist.
You Are What You Eat, Or, Haruki Murakami on Food As a Reflection of the Self
At The Awl, Elaheh Nozari explores food in the work of Haruki Murakami: how food not only offers comfort and nutrition, but about how what we eat speaks to our emotional state and who we are as people.
Haruki Murakami on the Weirdness of His Birthday as a Public Event
In the introduction to “Birthday Stories,” a 2004 anthology edited by Haruki Murakami, Murakami writes about the particular weirdness of having his birthday become a public event.
10 Short Stories I Loved in 2014
Below is a guest post from Pravesh Bhardwaj, a filmmaker based in Mumbai who has been posting his favorite short stories all year.
Are You In A Haruki Murakami Novel?
An elephant mysteriously vanishes. A giant frog is waiting in your apartment. Your cat mysteriously vanishes. Two moons hang in the sky. Your wife mysteriously vanishes. A strange man comes to you and asks you to find a sheep, or a woman calls and asks for ten minutes of your time. You might be the […]
Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has […]