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From The Desk Of Luna: Alan Furst

With their first new music since 2004’s Rendezvous, the master Lou Reed disciples in Luna return to one of their strengths: covers. A Sentimental Education finds the quartet—Dean Wareham, Britta Phillips, Sean Eden and Lee Wall—tackling mostly obscurities by the likes of Yes, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Mercury Rev and Fleetwood Mac. Simultaneously released companion piece A Place Of Greater Safety EP is all-original, however, though the six songs are instrumentals. Luna will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.

Wareham: While riding in planes, trains and automobiles, I like to kick back with some good genre fiction. I’ll even read crap like the Jack Reacher series; it passes the time, and some days that’s all you want. But if I want to learn something, too, I reach for an Alan Furst thriller, of which there are a baker’s dozen, set in Berlin, Paris under the Nazi occupation, Barcelona, Warsaw, generally on the eve of WWII or in the early days thereof. Sex, spies, champagne, Gestapo, the resistance, it’s all there. My favorite is Night Soldiers. In a similar vein but with a dash of American noir is the “Berlin trilogy” by Phillip Kerr, which follows police officer-cum-private detective Bernie Gunther around Berlin under Nazi rule as he tries to do the right thing.