“Writing about music,” the saying goes, “is like dancing about architecture.” If it's meant to dissuade, the warning has gone unheeded: Over the years, a number of novels about music have ingeniously translated this notoriously languageless experience into English. In rock novels or the burgeoning genre of lit-hop, most of the action happens to non-musicians—the listeners populating record stores, high schools, the streets. The primary focus of the jazz novel, however, is the musicians themselves. No other form pays as much attention to the players, their instruments, and the music as it is

There’s good sex and there’s bad sex. And then there’s weird sex—a Freudian purgatory that somehow neither stimulates the libido nor inhibits it. In art and life, we’re inclined to seek out pleasure to combat unpleasant reality. The sex in these books is too odd or awkward or off-kilter for that. I return to it to remember that little makes us feel more exposed, vulnerable, and humiliatingly human than taking off your clothes with another person—or alien, statue, vegetable, or disembodied arm.

Vanessa Roveto is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles.

What does it mean for a movie adaptation to be “true to the book”? Many movies based on novels unimaginatively transcribe plot and dialogue, as if the difference between literature and cinema were linguistic, and adaptation a simple matter of translation from one language to another. Filmmakers who succeed in turning great fiction into great cinema do so by a process of deep reading, perhaps even of criticism, teasing something essential out of the novel and communicating it cinematically. This list is hardly exhaustive, but below are some examples of excellent novels that spawned films that

What should we call the design, construction, and study of the built environment? “Geography” is too broad. “Regional planning” sounds like a job reserved for bureaucracies. “Urban planning”—the usual catchall term—is a holdover from the profession’s early years, when industrial blight was one of America’s biggest domestic problems. Today we are worrying about our cities for different reasons, and our suburbs and open spaces are demanding equal concern. How do we retrofit our aging suburbs? Can design foster stronger communities? What does sustainable development really mean? These questions

Figure skating is perhaps the least understood sport. The average layperson refers to every movement a skater completes as a “triple Axel” and forgets about the sport for four years at a time. Yet skating is, for some, an all-encompassing passion. A global sport, skating provides a lens through which one can explore some of the past century’s major historical phenomena (the AIDS crisis, the Cold War) and cultural trends (the cult of the sports commentator). The literature around figure skating is like the sport itself—entertaining, utterly human, flush with both absurdity and beauty. Here are

The greatest fear I harbor about having kids is that I will, as Philip Larkin puts it in “This Be the Verse,” fuck them up. I will fuck them up in some imperceptible way at first and there will be big consequences for it later. I fear that something will be “off” with my Hypothetical Child and I will be unaware or incapable of understanding it immediately, and that when I do finally become aware, I will somehow make matters worse by choosing the wrong treatment or not recognizing the gravity of whatever my child is going through. Perhaps, I fear, I will do too much and employ some intervention

If on a winter’s night a traveler, in a taxi headed south from Bombay’s airport with a heavy suitcase full of hard drives, handmade electronics, and newly bought used books, were to consider his or her recent trip from New York to a village in Europe, to suburban London to Cork to Cairo (via Amman), the exhausting thing about it wouldn’t be the sheer physical distance covered in economy seats, or the days of caffeine and work and nights of drinking and conversations but something in the background—the incredible range of contexts one, or if lucky two or three of us together, passes through and

In Flannery O’Connor’s recently published prayer journal, which she wrote in her early twenties, her ambitions as a fiction writer often get entangled with her aspirations to summon God into the work itself. “Start with the soul and perhaps the temporal gifts I want to exercise will have their chance. . . . God must be in all my work.” (See our review.) What makes her fiction great is not her intention to write directly about “Christian principles”; such an aim could have easily steered her to produce sermonizing fables or sentimental inspirational tales. Rather, her deeply original, dark, and

As the crossroads of Europe, Hungary has borne all the turbulent drama the continent could offer. Over the last century, Hungarians have gone from being proud citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to seeing most of their lands lost to neighboring countries after World War I to witnessing the rise of Hungarian fascists in league with the Nazis, who were replaced by the victorious Russians after World War II. Years of unrest eventually sparked the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a popular uprising infamously crushed by Red Army tanks and followed by decades of life under police-state control.

Bookforum contributor Christian Lorentzen picks his favorite novels of the year, from Coetzee's "deep joke" to Pynchon's portrayal of the "deep Web."

Christian Lorentzen is an editor at the London Review of Books.

Most books about the alphabet are geared toward kids; they’re for pre- and early readers who are just beginning to learn about letters, the basic building blocks of language. But the last century has seen the publication of a number of alphabet-related books that appeal to adults too. Some of these books were written with an adult audience in mind, while others transcend their intended youthful audience through their innovative form and content. All of the books on this list contain adult pleasures; they use the alphabetic sequence as a means to reflect on topics as varied as globalization,

Throughout the history of literature, writers have catalogued the myriad ways a man can love a woman. One complex and emotionally fraught part of this genre is dedicated to the mother-son relationship. Once the spell of childhood is broken, first loves, first passions, and other trials and tribulations chip away at what was once a special bond between a boy and his mother. Male writers have often attended to the fragile nature of the relationships with their mothers in memoir or semi-autobiographical fiction. The five works included here attempt to reconcile the child-son with the adult-son,