Lana and Andy Wachowski did one of those epic hero's-journey-of-the-entertainer profiles in The New Yorker this week, even though their next movie, an adaptation of David Mitchell's supposedly unfilmable novel Cloud Atlas, isn't out until October, and despite abundant evidence suggesting that getting your arc documented in The New Yorker on the eve of the release of some huge project is the quickest possible way to just hex the shit out of that project. Just ask Andrew Stanton, whammied with kindness by Tad Friend five months prior to the release of what turned out to be John Carter, if you can find the part of the desert he's buried in. Here, of course, the usual "Can this person who's waited his whole life for this one moment stick the landing in a way that somehow causes the clueless suits who doubted him to crash their car into a manure truck?" tension isn't the only draw. Lana and Andy were the most press-shy world-builders in this or any other alternate-timeline way back when Bill Clinton was president, bullet-time fight scenes were a novelty, and Lana was a man who went by Larry. So you're not only watching acclaimed fiction writer Aleksandar Hemon attempt to swag it out, acclaimed-fiction-writerishly, within the confines of one of magazine profile writing's genteelest genres — you're waiting for the moment, and it's coming, in which Lana makes a statement about how certain things should be private by saying the words "surgically constructed vagina" in The New Yorker.

For a work of fiction whose hydra-headed millennia-and-genre-hopping narrative begins at sea near 19th-century New Zealand and ends (um, spoiler alert, I guess, although the "end" in question happens around the halfway point) with a campfire story about man's final descent into barbarism in post-apocalyptic far-future Hawaii, David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas is actually pretty easy to follow, and even enjoy. It's a page-turner that happens to be engineered like a particle accelerator; there are actual stories (and actual cliffhangers) within its tricky nesting-doll structure, as well as prose that riffs on Daniel Defoe, Martin Amis, and Philip K. Dick, but also Pelican Brief–era John Grisham, as if Mitchell were writing for the spinner rack in an interdimensional airport.