“Birthday Girl” is a short story written by Haruki Murakami. It appeared in Harper’s Magazine in July 2003, as well as in “Birthday Stories” – a collection of short stories personally selected and introduced by Murakami.
I first referenced this story in a blogpost called What Would You Wish For last April, after a short but important and necessary trip to Singapore. I have been looking for the online version to share in here since.
Here’s the story, on the birthday of the girl in the story, November 17. The story was told when she was (at least) 30. That makes her in my age bracket.
Just that unlike her, my wish had come true. And I wish I wished for something else.
You know what they say. Careful what you wish for. Views: 370
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In Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortunetelling position with a wealthy family. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-President of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact.
In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience. Views: 362
Follow me as I cover a series of important business success ideas starting with Hiring. Are you hiring the wrong people most of the time? The goal of an organizational selection process is to add people to the organization (fill positions) who will benefit the organization. Likewise, a secondary goal must be to keep out any people who will harm the organization.The goal of an organizational selection process is to add people to the organization (fill positions) who will benefit the organization. Likewise, a secondary goal must be to keep out any people who will harm the organization. Another component of this involves assessing and differentiating applicants based on how much they can help (assessing qualifications and future potential). Any selection process also needs to be reliable and fair.When you select an employee, you are simply offering a prediction that this person selected will be successful as an employee and they will help your company. Furthermore, in any case where we need to identify current employees that are not helping the organization, there must be a valid mechanism in place for identifying and then removing these employees. So, why do we get this wrong so often?You’ll find that the success of almost any organization is highly correlated with the efficiency and effectiveness of its selection and retention processes.Are you hiring the wrong people most of the time? Views: 341
A coming-of-age story that pierces the soul and heals the spirit, this is the tale of the future leader of the Amazon women warriors. Rain must hold fast to her inner warrior, but she is startled and mystified by the first stirrings of mercy towards the enemy. Views: 291
Alice Hoffman is at her magical best in a new novel about loss and healing.
When her family is lost in a terrible disaster, 15-yr-old Green is haunted by loss and by the past. Struggling to survive physically and emotionally in a place where nothing seems to grow and ashes are everywhere, Green retreats into the ruined realm of her garden. But in destroying her feelings, she also begins to destroy herself, erasing the girl she'd once been as she inks ravens into her skin. It is only through a series of mysterious encounters -- with a ghostly white dog and a mute boy -- that Green relearns the lessons of love and begins to heal as she tells her own story. Views: 288
"Exciting, heartbreaking, and far from ordinary." —KirkusEmily Henry is "one of YA's preeminent voices....an exquisite, genre-bending novel. —BooklistThe Serpent King meets Stranger Things in Emily Henry's gripping novel about a group of friends in a small town who find themselves dealing with unexpected powers after a cosmic event.Almost everyone in the small town of Splendor, Ohio, was affected when the local steel mill exploded. If you weren't a casualty of the accident yourself, chances are a loved one was. That's the case for seventeen-year-old Franny, who, five years after the explosion, still has to stand by and do nothing as her brother lies in a coma. In the wake of the tragedy, Franny found solace in a group of friends whose experiences mirrored her own. The group calls themselves The Ordinary, and they spend their free time investigating local ghost stories and legends, filming their... Views: 283
The Farrells are a middle-class family living in a small New England town. Ivan Farrell is an astronomer, wife Polly a photographer, eight-year-old Charlie a budding biologist and 11-year-old Amanda a talented gymnast. And then one day, unimaginable tragedy strikes. Views: 267
A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakami’s international reputation.
It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company’s advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best. Views: 262
Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.
What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.
Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap. Views: 262
Over five years in the writing, The Dovekeepers is Alice Hoffman's most ambitious and mesmerizing novel, a tour de force of imagination and research, set in ancient Israel.
In 70 C.E., nine hundred Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on Masada, a mountain in the Judean desert. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic and iconic event, Hoffman's novel is a spellbinding tale of four extraordinarily bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path. Yael's mother died in childbirth, and her father, an expert assassin, never forgave her for that death. Revka, a village baker's wife, watched the horrifically brutal murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers; she brings to Masada her young grandsons, rendered mute by what they have witnessed. Aziza is a warrior's daughter, raised as a boy, a fearless rider and an expert marksman who finds passion with a fellow soldier. Shirah, born in Alexandria, is wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, a woman with uncanny insight and power.
The lives of these four complex and fiercely independent women intersect in the desperate days of the siege. All are dovekeepers, and all are also keeping secrets - about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love. Views: 261
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping is a powerful retelling of actual events from a turbulent period of Colombian history.
'She looked over her shoulder before getting into the car to be sure no one was following her'
Pablo Escobar: billionaire drugs baron, ruthless manipulator brutal killer and jefe of the infamous Madellin cartel. A man whose importance in the international drug trade and renown for his charitable work among the poor brought him influence and power in his home country of Colombia, and the unwanted attention of the American courts.
Terrified of the new Colombian President's determination to extradite him to America, Escobar found the best bargaining tools he could find: hostages.
In the winter of 1990, ten relatives of Colombian politicians, mostly women, were abducted and held hostage as Escobar attempted to strong-arm the government into blocking his extradition. Two died, the rest survived, and from their harrowing stories Marquez retells, with vivid clarity, the terror and uncertainty of those dark an volatile months.
'Reads with an urgency which belongs to the finest fiction. I have never read anything which gave a better sense of the way Colombia was in worst times' Daily Telegraph
'Compellingly readable. A book with all the panache of Marquez's fiction, hitting home rather harder' Sunday Times
'A piece of remarkable investigative journalism made all the more brilliant by the author's talent for magical storytelling' Financial Times Views: 252
An intimate look at writing, running, and the incredible way they intersect, from the incomparable, bestselling author Haruki Murakami.While simply training for New York City Marathon would be enough for most people, Haruki Murakami's decided to write about it as well. The result is a beautiful memoir about his intertwined obsessions with running and writing, full of vivid memories and insights, including the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in athletic pursuit.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 231
Collected Stories brings together many of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's spellbinding short stories, each brimming with a blend of the surreal, the magical, and the everyday that Nobel-Prize-winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude Marquez is known for.
Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel Garcia Marquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerizing tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo's revered matriarch; a every old angel with enormous wings, stranded in a young couple's back garden; a town plagued by dying birds that fall from the sky and an awestruck village captivated by a beautiful drowned sailor. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Marquez's stories are a delight.
'These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Marquez' Guardian
'Of all the living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Sunday Telegraph
'It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what "fabulous" really means' Time Out Views: 215
“Move over, Louisa May Alcott! Samantha Mabry has written her very own magical Little Women for our times.” —Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents In a stunning follow-up to her National Book Award-longlisted novel All the Wind in the World, Samantha Mabry weaves an aching, magical novel that is one part family drama, one part ghost story, and one part love story. The Torres sisters dream of escape. Escape from their needy and despotic widowed father, and from their San Antonio neighborhood, full of old San Antonio families and all the traditions and expectations that go along with them. In the summer after her senior year of high school, Ana, the oldest sister, falls to her death from her bedroom window. A year later, her three younger sisters, Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa, are still consumed by grief and haunted by their sister’s memory. Their dream of leaving... Views: 187
"The articles and columns in The Scandal of the Century demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start. . . . He's among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding. . . . He had a way of connecting the souls in all his writing, fiction and nonfiction, to the melancholy static of the universe." —Dwight Garner, The New York TimesFrom one of the titans of twentieth-century literature, collected here for the first time: a selection of his journalism from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s—work that he considered even more important to his legacy than his universally acclaimed works of fiction. "I don't want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize but rather for my journalism," Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been... Views: 141
