NPR is streaming the new Shearwater album, The Golden Archipelago (out February 23rd).

The Telegraph profiles author Daniel Handler.

About his family life, though, he is guarded, revealing only everyday details: he likes cooking, walking his son to school, playing music. It’s this discordance that is most intriguing about him: the shadow between the goofy, real-life Handler, and his ravaged, obsessive alter ego. Flashes of dry humour bubble up. When I ask him about the hugely successful film of the first three books, he replies: “I was hired to write eight drafts of the screenplay and then I was fired. But I have a policy that I can’t say anything nasty about a movie that bought me a house.”

BlackBook interviews author Adam Haslett about his new novel, Union Atlantic.

On sale at Amazon MP3: Yeasayer's new 10-track Odd Blood album for $3.99.

Author Daniyal Mueenuddin shares his influences at The Story Prize.

Tiny Mix Tapes is counting down its favorite albums of the decade.

The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the Apple iPad's possible effects on the publishing industry.

PopMatters interviews Yoko Ono.

The New Yorker features a new short story by Claire Keegan.

The Globe and Mail profiles singer-songwriter Owen Pallett.

Much of Heartland has a spacious, orchestral feeling – Pallett recorded the string tracks with an orchestra in Prague – though the scoring usually sounds (intentionally, I think) like an acoustic translation of something written on a synthesizer. Pallett’s high, cool voice floats over the chunky surface of the instrumental rhythms like an elfin creature flying over the sea, and he often has a good melodic zephyr to carry him along. The man has a flair for distinctive tunes – not a common thing in pop these days. The rules of classic song-writing have left their mark on Pallett, who in most other ways seems like a hipster’s hipster.

The Financial Times reviews the new Martin Amis novel, The Pregnant Widow.

This is Amis’s finest novel for a long time. It is close to a masterpiece, only undermined for me by frequent over-striving, which produces some false images and enervating repetitions; unlike his hero Saul Bellow, Amis is unfamiliar with restraint. But read it: it is hilarious, often wonderfully perceptive, uncompromisingly ambitious and written by a great master of the English language. In a time when many of our novelists are hedging their bets, Amis is gloriously undaunted.

BBC News reports that Neil Gaiman will write a Doctor Who episode.

Radiohead At Ease has new information about Radiohead's next album.

This week Five Chapters is serializing a new short story by Sam Lipsyte.

Win a $100 Threadless gift certificate in this week's Largehearted Boy contest.

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also at Largehearted Boy:

Atomic Books Comics Preview (highlights of the week's comics & graphic novel releases)
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Largehearted Word (highlights of the week's book releases)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Wild Beasts – “We Still Got the Taste Dancin’ on Our Tongues”

Paul Lehr

Frog Eyes - “A Flower in a Glove” Beginning with legs, jeans, socks, shoes, polish and a ring. Desdemona drinking a glass of milk, still drinks milk, an unbreakable habit for peanut butter toast. A distant family, father in sales (distant, travelling), brothers (one into piano, insular, one a chessmaster, hesitant) mother in jail (innocent-ish).

A fictional daughter asks her a question in the shower and she giggles in response, “It's sex, but you're too young, I'll tell you later.” On the bus, she's in another life, tilling fields and working her hands hard and tough and big-breasted raising a freckly family and happily eating a potato a day and maybe some carrots. A hard life looks like fun from the window of a bus, she smirks, twirling her hair between her fingers, on the way to the hospital... [released Apr. 24th]

Continue reading at Said The Gramophone...

Yeasayer – “O.N.E.” (XXXChange Remix) From the O.N.E. single, out 3/23 from Secretly Canadian. The band’s new full-length, Odd Blood, is out next week.

Midlake's Tim Smith talks to the Independent about the band's new album, The Courage of Others.

Blake isn't the only poetic influence feeding into the new album, as "Core of Nature" is built around a pertinent couplet from Goethe, "Into the core of nature/No earthly mind can enter." "I don't know much about Goethe, I just had a book of his poems from the library," Smith admits. "A lot of times, I'll use poetry to start coming up with a melody, because I don't write the lyrics first, I always start with the music and then see what sounds right coming out of my mouth. Certain words suit my voice better than others, and those words can then create the germ of an idea for a song. But I can't come up with it out of thin air, so a lot of times, to come up with an idea for a melody, I'll sit at the piano or guitar with a book of poetry and start singing the words, then I'll go back and replace them with my own lines. But that line was just so great, I realised I was never going to top that."

The Advocate interviews Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt.

Paste interviews Rilo Kiley drummer Jason Boesel about his solo album, Hustler's Son.

Billboard interviews Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers.

Web in Front is offering a free download of Radiohead's January Los Angeles performance to support Hait relief efforts.

Pitchfork has announced the first wave of acts for this summer's Pitchfork Music Festival, including Pavement, Modest Mouse, and St. Vincent.