Articles by Ben Dooley
May 27, 2009
Murakami’s 1Q84 is a Heavyweight 5
As the Japanese release date for Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 approaches, more information has begun to appear. Although the plot and the title’s meaning remain a total mystery, Amazon.co.jp has put up a page count, and it’s a whopping 1,055 pages. While size isn’t everything, it seem to be working in the book’s favor; published in [...]
May 19, 2009
Murakami Fans Rejoice: Counting Down to 1Q84 4
In just under two weeks, Japanese publisher Shinchosha will be releasing Haruki Murakami’s new novel, 1Q84. The Millions broke the news about the new novel last October, when Murakami discussed it during a reading held at Zellerbach Auditorium in UC Berkeley. Now, with the release of the novel imminent, the Internet is crawling with speculation [...]
January 20, 2009
Old Media is Dead, Long Live Old Media! 0
NPR’s On the Media ran a feature recently on entrepreneur Joshua Karp’s new startup the Printed Blog (TPB), a web aggregator that takes the best online content and… puts it on paper. Karp plans to print TPB twice a day and hand it out for free in major urban outlets. Content and advertising will be [...]
October 14, 2008
Haruki Murakami in Berkeley 4
This past weekend, Haruki Murakami appeared at U.C. Berkeley’s Zellerbach Auditorium for a reading of his short stories and a wide-ranging conversation about his work and life. Despite my disappointment with his recent work, Murakami ranks as one of my favorite writers, and it was a pleasure to finally see the notoriously shy writer in [...]
September 16, 2008
Last Chance to Appear in the Last Book 0
Whither the book? A question we at The Millions struggle with on a semi-regular basis, and one that has inspired the National Library of Spain to commission a project entitled “The Last Book.” Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer has been entrusted with the task, and he in turn is calling for the writers (and readers) of [...]
July 6, 2008
The Manchurian Legacy 6
The New York Times ran an interesting article last week on the origins of the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. The article claims that methods for questioning prisoners at the facility were directly adapted from those used by the Communist Chinese to torture and indoctrinate American soldiers during the Korean War. At the time, [...]
