David Mitchell’s new work, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” is conventional in more ways than one. Not only is the novel, set in Japan at the end of the 18th century, the least experimental ...

After six nested stories spanning as many centuries ("Cloud Atlas") and a 13-year-old's coming-of-age in Margaret Thatcher's England ("Black Swan Green"), David Mitchell's new novel gives us Dejima in ...

The pain in Jacob's nose suggests a breakage, but the stickiness on his hands and knees is not blood. Ink, the clerk realizes, hauling himself upright. Like Jacob, nailed on the nose with an ink pot ...

The critical word on David Mitchell is that he walks on water. Mitchell's first novel (written before he turned 30) is called Ghostwritten, and, like his more recent triumph, Cloud Atlas, it's the ...

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is now available in paperback. This interview was originally broadcast on Aug. 5, 2010. David Mitchell's latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is ...

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From the mid-18th century until 1800 the Dutch East India Company dominated trade with Japan, but did so on terms dictated by Japan's rulers. The Dutch trading post was a manmade island in Nagasaki ...

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. It’s hard to pin Mitchell down: His writing roves time, place, continents, and genres ...

You wouldn’t expect a conventional historical novel from David Mitchell, the author of postmodern works like 2004’s Cloud Atlas. And while The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet seems at first to be a ...