Perhaps it is appropriate that the publication of Travis Burkett’s debut novel, An American Band, follows by several years the death of Texas’ most famous minor regional novelist. Burkett has a similar connection to the Western setting, one not informed by apocalyptic ideation or voyeurism, but lived experience. It is because of this that I believe he is so uniquely suited to act as a chronicler of an American experience which is more diverse and complicatedly informed than an outsider might be capable of reckoning, and An American Band is a pleasure to read, a novel of its time that projects outside of it into a murky future. A novel about a band, a group of friends, and the lonely longing and pain wrought by a suffering that too often goes unseen.