Katherine Anne Porter's short stories are unsurpassed in modern fiction

Porter writes English of a purity and precision almost unique in contemporary fiction

She solves the essential problem: how to satisfy exhaustively in writing briefly

Porter's stories take accurate and deadly aim... dazzling

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.