What I Talk about When I Talk about Running: A Memoir
About this audiobook
From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore comes this rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running and the integral impact both have made on his life. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers Murakami’s four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon. Settings range from Tokyo, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston, among young women who outpace him. Through this marvelous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs, and the experience, after age fifty, of having seen his race times improve and then fall back.
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About the author
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. The most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.
Philip Gabriel has published translations of four novels, one short story collection, and two works of non-fiction by Haruki Murakami, as well as short stories of Murakami’s in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and elsewhere. His translation of Kuroi’s novel Life in the Cul-de-sac won the 2001 Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the translation of Japanese Literature, and in 2006 he was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a book which was selected by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of 2005. He has recently completed translations of a second novel by Yoshida Shuichi, Parade, and Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
Ray Porter is a prolific voice actor that has recorded for over 100 audio books and dozens of television series, video games and video shorts. Among his wide variety of audiobook credits are The Silver Linings Playbook, The Black Hole War, and the Joe Ledger series. He claims, “With every book I’ve done, I have found that the author has a voice and if I can just do my best to stay out of the way of that voice, then the writer will convey what he’s trying to put across. So for me, it’s really more about enabling the text and what the author is trying to say.”
