Amazon contributor Charles Solomon picks his top 10 anime releases of 2009. See more picks in the Best Movies & TV of 2009.

1. Akira [Blu-ray]: Katsuhiro Otomo’s landmark Akira (1988) has been remastered for 1080p HD, which showcases Otomo’s flamboyant palette and the translucent colors he uses for the flamboyant signage of Neo-Tokyo and the trails left by the speeding motorcycles. Dust, dirt and scratches have been digitally removed, and the state-of-the-art sampling and bit rates reveal previously undetectable elements in the complex soundtrack. The Blu-Ray edition is a must-have not just for otaku, but for anyone interested in animation.
2. Big Windup: Part 1: Although he’s a talented pitcher with exceptional control, Ren Mihashi, the insecure hero of Big Windup! (2007), was treated so badly by his middle-school teammates, he’s convinced he’s an utter failure. It’s a sports series that will even appeal to viewers who hate baseball. The fun continues in Big Windup: Part 2, but the series ends after only 26 episodes, leaving the audience wanting more.
3. Bleach Uncut Box Set, Vol. 3: The Rescue: The third season of the hit fantasy-adventure Bleach concludes the first major story arc. Princess Yoruichi–who’s been disguised as a talking cat–takes orange-haired, hot-tempered Ichigo to learn to achieve Bankai, the ultimate power over his Zanpak- tô sword, by dueling with Zangetsu, the spirit of the sword.
4. Case Closed: Season Five: Trapped in the puny body of eight-year-old Conan Edogawa, teen sleuth Jimmy Kudo continues to solve crimes, sometimes aided by the kids in the Junior Detective League. Although Case Closed (1996) ran for more than 500 episodes, directors Kenji Kodama and Yasuichiro Yamamoto keep the series fresh and exciting.
5. Dragon Ball: Season One: Dragon Ball
   (1986) launched one of the most popular franchises in anime history, with its special blend of male bonding, rigorous training, martial arts fighting, and slapstick comedy. For years, the first episodes of Dragon Ball were only available in the U.S. in a heavily edited
   form: this new release restores all the excised footage, including scenes of the prepubescent Goku and Krillin running around naked.
6. Evangelion: 1.01 You Are (Not) Alone: The eagerly anticipated Evangelion: 1.01 is the first installment in a four-feature retelling of Hideaki Anno’s watershed series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995). Anno was able to rehire most of the staff from the original series, but the use of computer graphics enables the filmmakers to amp up the visuals. That and the tighter story-telling will win over even skeptics who doubted whether there was any need for yet another version.
7. Naruto Shippuden, Vol. 1: Although he’s learned a lot of new
   skills, Naruto remains the irrepressible knucklehead audiences know
   and love. Naruto Shippuden reunites director Hayato
   Date with many of the artists and voice actors from the first series.
   The results feel familiar yet new: it’s just what legions of
   Naruto fans have been waiting for.
8. Sword of the Stranger: Dynamically staged and
   animated, Masahiro Ando’s Sword of the Stranger (2007) is a no-holds-barred samurai action film that happens to be animated. It will delight devotees of that genre as well as anime fans.
9. Death Note, Vol. 9: Director Tetsuro Araki pulls out all the stops to bring Death Note to a suspenseful conclusion. Death Note proved so popular, it was remade into three live action features in
   Japan. In the second film, Death Note Movie II: The Last Name, Shusuke Kaneko brings the story a much more satisfying conclusion by keeping the focus on the intellectual duel between Light and L.

Having grown up outside of D.C., I’ve always read Edward P. Jones’s stories with a particular hunger, both for their endless literary qualities, and for the way they insistently map parts of the city I’ve long known on the map but never from the inside, the way he tells them. It’s thrilling to have the best fiction writer in the city’s long history (it was his face I put on our DC quarter in the last entry of our Books of the States series last year) working and writing in our lifetimes, so of course I am eager to hear what he’s been working on since his last book, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, came out in 2006. The initial, deflating answer, according to Neely Tucker’s profile coming out in Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine, is that he hasn’t written a thing. But, it turns out, not writing anything down doesn’t mean Jones hasn’t been writing:





So when he swirled the wine around in his glass, looked up and asked if
I’d like to hear the opening and closing lines of the first short story
he’s worked on in nearly half a decade, “The Waiting Room,” a story
that won’t be published for who knows how long, I was startled.





Jones dictated the opener:





“In late May 1956 — a little more than a year after my mother
bought the Fifth Street NW house that was the beginning of her small
empire — she heard a rumor that my father was dying.”





Here’s how it ends:





“And it would have been a great church had it not been for the dead man and all his flowers way down in front.”





When I scribbled it in my notebook, Jones told me that this was the
first time it had been written down anywhere. Jones spent 10 years
creating nearly all of his Pulitzer-winning, antebellum-era novel, “The
Known World,” in his head, until he finally set it all down on paper in
a three-month rush in 2001 after being laid off from his job at a tax
publication. “The Waiting Room” is still locked up tight in his mind,
though he dictates the opening and closing three times in a row, down
to the dashes and commas, without so much as blinking.




“I write a lot in my head,” he says. “I’ve never been driven to write things down.”











Go and read the whole thing. Jones is a one-of-a-kind figure, a humble, eccentric, driven man who lives in near anonymity while being recognized as one of the great writers of our day, and Tucker’s piece is one of the best author profiles I’ve read in a very long time. –Tom




P.S. Also see the video tribute to Jones that another great DC writer, George Pelecanos, recorded for us at BEA this year: