This summer, a friend of mine sent me an album by a band called Fictionist as a reciprocal recommendation after I sent him a copy of The Republic Tigers’ Keep Color. My initial impression of the record, Lasting Echo was vaguely positive, but it took a few listens to really start to appreciate what subtle things were happening throughout its eleven surprisingly diverse tracks. Fictionist seems to be the type of band that doesn’t immediately settle in with listeners’ ears, which is why I don’t feel out of …

Tomorrow sees the state-side release of David Mitchell’s fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet.  It marks the author’s first real journey into the sometimes thorny world of historical fiction.  Apart from a short treatment of the Falklands War in the semi-autobiographical bildungsroman Black Swan Green, Mitchell tends to consider the real world’s history malleable and sometimes sloughs it completely in favor of complex nested realities, as in Cloud Atlas.  A follower of Mitchell’s might consider this new work a strange undertaking, but thankfully, Mitchell has completely forgone the …

Late last year, Sherman Alexie did an interview in support of his new book War Dances.  The interview has an utter absence of discussion of the book, and instead focuses on his refusal to allow the book to appear digitally in any consumer format.  His is a contentious position.  He believes that “with the open source culture of the internet, the idea of artistic ownership goes away,” and that “the celebration of books inside each community is gone.”  He says that he will, in the future, adapt his writing to …