Haruki Murakami has time and again proven himself as one of today's fiction greats, effortlessly jumping between the subtle and real and the strange and surreal over the course of novels and even chapters. His latest novel comes out in English on August 12th — a quick turnaround by translator Philip Gabriel, as the novel was only released in Japanese back in April 2013. Titled Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the new novel is said to blend in the type of dreamlike elements that Murakami fans have come to expect from his longer stories. If you can't wait two weeks to start reading, a good long excerpt is available over at Slate.