Book Club for Dumplings
March 30th, 2007 by dd
The Dumpling supports a well rounded lifestyle. Work Hard, Play Hard… Sound Mind, Sound Body, yadda yadda yadda. So in addition to US Weekly, Hello!, Apple Daily (HK Newspaper), and DailyDumpling.com, of course, you should include something without any pictures in it that might actually be intellectually stimulating. To that end, DD is throwing down the gauntlet and challenging Oprah for Book Club dominance. Oh yeah, it’s on, Big O!…
DaDump is recommending anything and everything written by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. His most recent collection of short stories recently won the Kiriyama Prize, an award dedicated “to recognize outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia that encourage greater mutual understanding of and among the peoples and nations of this vast and culturally diverse region.”
DaDump was serendipitously introduced to him by Int’l Gum Girl, a gamine with big eyes, an attitude, and a penchant for randomness… but I digress. Just know that Murakami’s stories can be as surreal and random as yours truly.
So pick up a copy of anything Murakami (Norwegian Wood is a good starter novel), impress your friends, and thank me later. You can read more about his most recent prize after the jump!
Haruki Murakami’s “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” a sometimes surreal collection of short stories, and Greg Mortenson’s and David Oliver Relin’s “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time,” are this year’s winners of the 11th annual Kiriyama Prize.
The $30,000 award, to be divided between the three winners, was announced Tuesday by Pacific Rim Voices, a nonprofit organization “dedicated to celebrating literature that contributes to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia.”
Murakami, the fiction winner, is known for novels such as “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and “Kafka on the Shore.” Among the finalists were Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss,” winner of the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle fiction award.
“Three Cups of Tea,” the nonfiction winner of the Kiriyama, tells of Mortenson’s founding of the Central Asia Institute, which has built dozens of schools around Pakistan and
Afghanistan.
Previous winners of the Kiriyama Prize include Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry. [Y!]
Posted in Japan, Haruki Murakami | 