Outside

Reading this by Condalmo reminded me of two things:

1) Maybe it is a shame that I don’t read Murakami anymore. Sputnik Sweetheart and many of the After the Quake stories just didn’t do anything for me. Occasionally I would read something of his from the New Yorker and it was the same thing: everything good about the writing was an echo from books past, but made much duller my Murakami’s insistence on not aging his nameless, often befuddled protagonists as he ages. They just stay in an ever more idealized 30s, still obsessed with order, ordinariness, amelioration, ladies, etc, but with an increasingly lack of urgency. Perhaps After Dark is different.

2) Book covers are quite important to me. As almost any genre reader will tell you, it is hard to defend your own taste and intelligence when you are more than occasionally spotted reading a book with a soaring spaceship/green alien/huge-breasted woman in the clutches of a green alien on the cover. My recent utter intimacy with Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown has left me plenty of moments to ponder the cover designed by Goodloe Byron. I think it works perfectly for the story and is good-looking in its own right, if you like apocalyptic settings or maps or BOTH.
PS>the cover featured on the Soft Skull site is only similar to what's on the front cover of the hardback.