Inside Jacket

The arrival of 2010 is exciting for at least two reasons. First, the start of a new decade means that people should finally ditch the cumbersome “two-thousand-and…” formulation, and just call the year “twenty-ten.” (Hendrik Hertzberg gives this issue the close study it deserves in his post “Twenty-Something.”) Second, we can stop looking back on the year and decade that was, and turn our attention to a new publishing calendar.

I’m particularly excited about the following books, all coming out in the first months of the year: “Day out of Days,” a collection of short stories by Sam Shepard (January 12th), “The Infinities,” a novel by John Banville (February 23rd), and Peter Carey’s “Parrot and Olivier in America” (April 20th), a satirical nineteenth-century road-trip novel that channels Alexis de Tocqueville.

Additionally, I’ll be counting down the months until June, when Random House will publish David Mitchell’s “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” Just forty, Mitchell has built a career marked by versatility. He followed his wildly ambitious novel “Cloud Atlas“—a time-jumping genre-bender with a narrative structure akin to a set of Russian dolls—with “Black Swan Green,” a modest yet perfectly executed bildungsroman.

This August, the Guardian published “The Massive Rat,” a terse portrait of a failing marriage that revealed a precise, realist style new to Mitchell. Yet “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” is conceived on a grander scale, judging by Amazon’s product description, which has me wringing my hands like a sweaty, adolescent fanboy:

The year is 1799, the place Dejima, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window to the world. It is also the farthest-flung outpost of the powerful Dutch East Indies Company. To this place of superstition and swamp fever, crocodiles and courtesans, earthquakes and typhoons, comes Jacob de Zoet. The young, devout and ambitious clerk must spend five years in the East to earn enough money to deserve the hand of his wealthy fiancée. But Jacob’s intentions are shifted, his character shaken and his soul stirred when he meets Orito Aibagawa, the beautiful and scarred daughter of a Samurai, midwife to the island’s powerful magistrate. In this world where East and West are linked by one bridge, Jacob sees the gaps shrink between pleasure and piety, propriety and profit.

Philip Roth, John Banville, and Amos Oz are among the nominees for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Colum McCann, T. J. Stiles, and Keith Waldrop win National Book Awards.

“The Imperial Cruise” argues that Theodore Roosevelt based his foreign policy on odd notions of race.

Junot Diaz failed for five years while writing “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”

Big event books get their own movie-style trailers.

Karl Rove’s memoir “Courage and Responsibility” will be published in March.

A Minnesota father spoke only Klingon to his child for three years.

Barack Obama is the subject of more than sixty children’s books.

“Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife,” Felix Feneon wrote in the French newspaper Le Matin. “Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.” These two sentences, written in 1906, could be a pithy, crystalline novel. They are terse, but they contain humor, pathos, tension—the writer’s ultimate demonstration of control. Feneon published more than a thousand such three-line dispatches in a single year, but, more recently, he’s been one-upped by a spate of books from SMITH Magazine with even stricter parameters: memoirs consisting of only six-words.

The latest contribution is “It All Changed In an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.” Many of the contributors, faced with such severe limits on so amorphous a subject, slip into the maudlin. (“Once in love, now in tears,” opines the average page.) But a few rise out. John Banville poignantly laments, “Should have lived more, written less,” though I’m not sure that his readers would agree. Others defy the space constraint with a shrug of humor. Frank McCourt, for instance, shows his sly side, winking “the miserable childhood leads to royalties.” “Some are left alive,” Ann Coulter proclaims, “quick reload,” while Sarah Silverman writes, “Said vagina more than necessary. Vagina.” But perhaps it’s Hilary Mantel, the recent winner of the Booker Prize, who shows how much verbosity and effort it takes a true writer to winnow down to precision: “Took breath. Took ill. Took notes.”