If anyone has perused my bio here even a little, they will know that I am a fan of anime and manga – Japanese cartoons and comics, typically of a more adult nature. And not “dirty” adult, but grown-up focused instead. One such series, a favorite of mine since 2002 when I first noticed it, has been a small-market series called Excel Saga, created by Japanese mangaka Rikudo Koshi. Excel Saga might be familiar to some reading this, but not in the context I am writing about today. The most …

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 …