There are whole fistfuls of masterpieces in this one volume: a cornucopia of invention... The Collected Stories, when all is said and done, is an American Master's 'Book of Creation'.

Sparkling and triumphant, Isaac Bashevis Singer's stories are filled with wonder, gratitude, humour, irony and a wry eroticism that manages to exalt the pleasures of the flesh and the soul at the same time

Dazzlingly elegant...In a world where even the ground beneath our feet can't be relied on, imagination becomes less of a luxury and more of a duty. It's an obligation that Murakami is busily making his raison d'etre, to our very great advantage

In the world of literary fiction, Haruki Murakami is unquestionably a superstar...Many critics have touted Murakami for the Nobel Prize. If he can stay on this kind of form, he could be in with a chance

Murakami is a unique writer, at once restrained and raw, plainspoken and poetic

A neat, yet somehow insanely generous collection..ruthless honesty, a faintly feminine openness, a seeming ability to find beauty and even glory in the banal, the urban, the modern... [the story] 'Honey Pie' isn't just a love story. It's a piece of writing about the threads and snags of time, the tangles, the way things pan out and why. I couldn't even begin to explain why I find it quite so moving and, in a sense, that's Murakami's magic. He speaks to a place so deep inside us that we can scarcely even reply

Beautifully nuanced stories, realistic snapshots of modern Japan enclosed in a fictional world that is seemingly trivial, but loaded with portent

A really imaginative collection where all the stories are intertwined and mysterious in that Murakami way

Murakami's storytelling inspires intimacy. It's the particular kind of intimacy that can evolve between a reader and a book, unspoken and unexpected, familiar, satisfying, strange.

Even in the slipperiest of Mr Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out warm with life.

Murakami is one of the best writers around.

Murakami is a true original and yet in many ways he is also Franz Kafka's successor because he seems to have the intelligence to know what Kafka truly was - a comic writer.