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What a bonus it is to have a new David Mitchell book only a year after the incredible The Bone Clocks. David Mitchell started this story on twitter but became obsessed with the story he had started and needed to see it through. The result is a ghost story in the hands and imagination of […]

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Time is, Time was, Time is not What a bonus it is to have a new David Mitchell book only a year after the incredible The Bone Clocks. David Mitchell started this story on twitter but became obsessed with the story he had started and needed to see it through. The result is a ghost […]

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I have always been a reader, but eight years ago, strange circumstances conspired to make me totally book-dependent. I was stuck within four walls, desperate for distraction and a conduit to the world; but I had to live in total darkness, unable to see words on a page. So, from the small player in the [...]

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I was asleep on the floor of the magicians' apartment. Not one, but three magicians lived there, and their mysterious, mischievous, and sometimes macabre props surrounded my living-room floor futon. A straitjacket hung on the coat rack, a mini-guillotine sat over the fireplace, a mechanical monkey poked out from behind the couch, and an artificial [...]

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A lot of amazing authors contribute to Powell's Blog, and not all of them get the attention they deserve. Here's a look back at some of the most thought-provoking author posts to appear on Powells.com this year — along with four interviews that you really shouldn't miss. The World of Publishing: 1991 vs. 2014 by [...]

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Few topics are more contentious at Powell's than agreeing on the "best" works of fiction. Our tastes run the gamut from experimental tragicomedies to multi-generational sagas to offbeat coming-of-age tales to surreal character studies... and so on. As such, rather than present selections from one perspective, we thought it wise to get a more representative [...]

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Every week, we gather together a small pile of newly released titles that we agree should be on everyone's radar. We deem these titles our New Favorites (check out our recent picks here). Now that the year is winding down, we thought we'd take a look back at some of the standouts, in case you [...]

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Describe your latest book. My new novel is called Station Eleven. It's about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America. The book moves back and forth in time between the years just before a devastating flu pandemic brings about the collapse of civilization as we know it, and a time 20 years [...]

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After only reading Cloud Atlas I was already in awe of David Mitchell so I dove straight into his new novel at the first available opportunity. And once again was swept away by the storytelling, the language and the imagination. The book has been described as “his most Cloud Atlas-y novel since the global phenom Cloud Atlas” and I […]

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With the sweeping global vision and ability to sum up whole eras of time that he's become known for, along with a fascinating dose of fantasy, The Bone Clocks is David Mitchell's most enthralling and illuminating novel yet. Gorgeously written, bracingly intelligent, poignant, and occasionally very funny, The Bone Clocks is one of my favorite [...]

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This is an absolutely wonderful coming-of-age novel by a writer who cannot put a foot wrong. David Mitchell doesn’t just get inside the head of a thirteen year old boy but brings teenage adolescence to life like I have never read before. David Mitchell captures the innocence, the naivety, the pain and the joy so […]

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My obsession with David Mitchell continues and is getting more intense. There are books you devour. There are books you savour and never want to end. And then there are David Mitchell books which are both. I went with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet because there was a reference and crossover with The Bone Clocks. It is […]

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British author David Mitchell is taking to Twitter to publish his latest short story. He began the project today under the hashtag #THERIGHTSORT. You can read the story at this link.

The story is told from the point of view of a boy who is high on his mother’s Valium. “He likes Valium because it reduces the bruising hurly-burly of the world into orderly, bite-sized ‘pulses’. So the boy is essentially thinking and experiencing in Tweets,” Mitchell told The Guardian. “My hope is then that the rationale for deploying Twitter comes from inside the story, rather than it being imposed by me, from outside, as a gimmick.”

Here is an excerpt:

We get off the Number 10 bus at a pub called ‘The Fox and Hounds’. ‘If anyone asks,’ Mum tells me, ‘say we came by taxi.’

— David Mitchell (@david_mitchell) July 14, 2014

Mitchell is not the first author to experiment with Twitter as a story telling platform.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Where has David Mitchell been all my reading life? People have raved to me about David Mitchell many times and after seeing the excitement over proof copies of his new novel, The Bone Clocks, (due out in September) I finally decided to find out what all the fuss was about. Cloud Atlas was universally declared as the place to start and David Mitchell immediately blew me away.

On the surface Cloud Atlas appears to be six separate stories and they each work independently of one another. The stories range from  a colonial journal, to  a 1970s political thriller through to post-apocalyptic vision of our world. Each story is a magnificent piece of storytelling. Mitchell’s use of language is staggering in its skill, imagination and breadth. Each story takes his writing to new levels with the sixth story astonishing in its linguistic achievement and storytelling.

But the genius of Cloud Atlas is the way that David Mitchell has joined these stories together. The stories are interlocked in intricate and subtle ways. At first it feels like you are adding layers and when you reach the apex of Mitchell’s timeline you begin peeling them back. But it is even more than that. It is very much a sextet of stories. Each carefully arranged and conducted by an author who is unconfined by time, space or genre and utilizing the limitlessness of his imagination.

Each year I manage to discover a new author who I have missed along the way. This year’s discovery is a goldmine and I cannot wait to devour David Mitchell’s other books.before diving in to The Bone Clocks which has been described as “his most Cloud Atlas-y novel since the global phenomenon Cloud Atlas”. Can’t wait!!

Buy the book here…

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A long trailer for Cloud Atlas has been released online, giving us a glimpse of Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in the adaptation of David Mitchell‘s award-winning novel. Follow this link to watch the trailer at Apple.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the trailer has driven some new interest in the book, making it the seventh most popular book on Amazon: “To cash in on the renewed interest, Random House has ordered a new paperback printing of 25,000 copies, to hit stores before a special movie-tie in edition of the book is released in September. Currently, “Cloud Atlas” has 227,000 paperback copies in print in the U.S.”

We’ve embedded the trailer above–what do you think? The film comes out October 26th. Follow this link to see cast photos from the movie as well. The Matrix creators Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (the creators of The Matrix) directed the movie.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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The American Academy of Arts and Letters has given novelist David Mitchell the $20,000 E.M. Forster Award. The prize intended to help “a young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States.”

In all, the academy gave $160,000 in awards to 18 different writers for its annual awards. The awards will be handed out at a ceremony in May. Winners are nominated by the 250 members of the Academy.

We’ve listed all the winners below. (Via Sarah Weinman)

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Actress Susan Sarandon and actor Jim Broadbent will star alongside Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in the upcoming film adaptation of Cloud Atlas.

Directing duo Andy and Lana Wachowski (the creators of The Matrix) will helm this project. Author David Mitchell published Cloud Atlas in 2004. The novel earned the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award.

Here’s more from The Hollywood Reporter: “The film, is an adaptation of the epic novel by David Mitchell which follows six storylines, each set in a different place and era, stretching from the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future. Each actor in the film will be playing multiple roles.” (via Shelf Awareness)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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James Wood, the critic, in his New Yorker appraisal (July 5, 2010) of David Mitchell ("The Floating Library:  What can't the novelist David Mitchell do?") quotes Henry James:

"If Conrad's great master, Henry James, was right when he said that the novel should press down on "the present palpable intimate" (he used the triad to distinguish the role of the living novel from that of the historical novel), then Mitchell's new book...."

(read to find out)

The point for me, right now, is Present Palpable Intimate and whether or not it can be achieved in an historical novel.  I believe it can, or at least, in my own work, I have fought for that.  In Flow, in Dangerous Neighbors, in a work now in progress, the quest has been to scrub away the sepia, to make the then feel now, to make it essential and current. 


That, in any case, has been the quest.

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
by David Mitchell
(Random House, June 2010)

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Anyone who has ever read my blog, or ever met me, stands a good chance of having heard me talk about David Mitchell. It's rather satisfying, at my age, to have discovered my Favorite Living Writer. Ever since Cloud Atlas left me slack-jawed and inarticulate with its puzzle structure and fearlessly ambitious plots and astonishing humor and humanist compassion and heartbreaking truths -- okay, even before that, when I snapped up Ghostwritten and Number Nine Dream with the satisfaction of finding just what one wanted to eat, a meal that becomes a sweet memory -- and especially afterward, when I met the man at book readings for Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green and he turned out to be the kind, brilliant, self-effacing person you hope in your heart of hearts that your favorite authors might turn out to be -- David Mitchell has been my model for what writing and writers can be, and I have described myself truthfully if unflatteringly as a slavering fan. (That sentence was just because I could. Sorry.)

But having a favorite writer also means you approach every new work of theirs with an inevitable trepidation: will it hold up? Will you have to love it half-heartedly, out of loyalty, or will it blow you away again? Will it move you in the same way -- or better yet, in a different way -- or will it be simply good, and not great?

For this reason, after I had gotten Random House's postcard last fall announcing a new David Mitchell title coming in June, and after I had begged the publicist to consider Greenlight for an event*, and after Mitchell's wonderful editor David Ebershoff had stopped into Greenlight and we'd talked about our mutual love for the man, and after Ebershoff had, taking pity on me, sent me the bound manuscript for Mitchell's new book -- I looked at it on my shelf for about a month and a half before opening it. I told myself and other people I wanted to wait until I could set aside time to read it straight through, and that was partly true. But of course I was also nervous about whether he could do it again, and whether I could love like that again. Finally, on the plane to see my family in California for a post-Christmas vacation, I pulled the 8 1/2 by 11 thing out of my bag and started to read.

So? What was it like? It was not like Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten; it was a single narrative thread, ostensibly, the story of a Dutch trading post in Japan in 1799 and following. I noted with satisfaction that it was written in third person, a first for Mitchell -- he had noted at a reading I attended that he had always written in first person, since he "wouldn't know where to look" without a single perspective, but that third person sounded like a challenge he should set himself -- and look here, he had.

I also noted, as no doubt reviewers will, that one thread of this narrative involves a European (in Jacob de Zoet's case a Dutchman, in Mitchell's case an Irishman) falling in love with a Japanese girl (in de Zoet's case, Orito Aibagawa, a young surgeon in training who has a scar that makes her unmarriageable, but not unbeautiful; in Mitchell's case, his now wife and mother of his children, whom I know not

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Click the play button on this flash player to listen to the podcast now:

Or click MP3 File to start your computer's media player.

SHOW NOTES:

> Author Amy Meltzer discusses her picture book A Mezuzah on the Door, an Association of Jewish Libraries Notable Book and PJ Library selection

> Author Eric Kimmel shares mezuzah memories

> Author Sarah Gershman and illustrator Kristina Swarner talk about their Sydney Taylor Book Award winning picture book, The Bedtime Sh'ma: A Good Night Book. This book was also a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, and is a PJ Library selection.

> Author Maggie Anton shares mezuzah memories

Special background music for this episode is provided by The Bedtime Sh'ma Companion CD and by Cantor Jeff Klepper's "Mezuzah" song on the CD Shiron L'Yeladim. Our regular background music is provided by The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band.

Books and CD's mentioned on the show may be borrowed from the Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel. Browse our online catalog to reserve books, post a review, or just to look around!

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