It is still unclear exactly what America under the presidency of Donald J. Trump will look like. But if we believe his campaign promises—deporting of millions of people, registering Muslims, gutting the Affordable Care Act—it’s apparent that sustained political resistance will be necessary. Already, protestors have taken to the streets of cities like New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Portland, and in many other places.

The idea of buying citizenship tends to invoke Bond villains or the louche drifters in Graham Greene’s novels. But it’s also a very real practice that offends nationalists, rankles politicians, and incites populist rage. It hints at a breakdown of the social contract, a “marketization” of everyday life that was practically unimaginable just ten years ago, and perhaps even the creeping obsolescence of the nation-state itself.

When it comes to literature, the word southern practically begs for the follow-up gothic. A certain set of tropes spring to mind when you mention the South: alligators and frosted julep cups, hypocritical preachers and Civil War widows, decaying mansions and petit fours. With all the antebellum remnants to contend with, you don’t expect anyone to be very funny.

Looking through the notebook of an artist or writer is a revelatory experience: To enter their laboratory, where they are free of the weight of expectation, is to witness the unpredictable process in which ideas, materials, forms are first conceived and tested, discarded or developed. Notebooks are mysteriously alive—thought laid bare. Notes, sketches, and collaged scraps reveal the strange and compelling metamorphoses that result when writers and artists experiment and play, opening the field of possibilities. What notebooks have—in comparison with more finely wrought, finished works—are imperfections and flaws that make for a different kind of complexity.

William Gaddis, the author perhaps most concerned with the entropic decay of older systems and organizational principles in fiction, famously taught a class at Bard College in 1979 on “The Literature of Failure.” The books on his syllabus, which included texts ranging from Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, gestured toward an ethic of personal failure or insufficiency—a sense of one’s faulty position within the baroque machinery of American productivity.

A narrator is a much stranger toy at the novelist’s disposal than is usually thought. It’s not just something as depressingly ordinary as a character—more a vast system of smuggling. And there’s one kind of narrative voice or tone in particular that offers a way to explore that difficult relationship at the hidden center of every art form: the one between writer and reader (or spectator). Although this tone seems to exist most easily in novels, it isn’t only to be found there—it appears wherever anyone tries to figure out what a monologue might mean, or how to talk to

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. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney The opening love scene of this baroque, dystopian behemoth takes the possibility of

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 are works of art