Netflix put all seven episodes of East of Eden online on October 1. Zoe Kazan adapted it, which closes a family loop of sorts: her grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film with James Dean, and that film used only the last stretch of Steinbeck’s novel. Lee doesn’t appear in it at all. The series takes the whole thing, from 1862 to 1918. Tracy Letts plays Cyrus Trask, with Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist as his sons, Adam and Charles.

My copy is the Penguin film tie-in, secondhand, cover soft at the corners, Ben Kingsley’s face floating over a block of hot orange. Usually a tie-in edition is a warning sign. It means the book is being sold on the back of a film, and the film is generally the reason nobody bothers with the book afterwards. This one is the exception. The novel is very good and the film is very good, and they are good in different enough ways that neither spoils the other.

Ask for “a recent samurai movie like 13 Assassins” and you’ll get a pile of recommendations that share a costume and nothing else. Everyone points you at the streaming series. Most of them miss. The problem is that the request is usually about structure, not setting. What people remember from Miike’s film isn’t the swords. It’s the assembly. Somebody decides a man has to die, somebody else goes around collecting the people who will do it, and then those people walk into a village they know they won’t walk out of.

“The book was better” is the laziest line in criticism. Nine times out of ten it means the reader got there first and resents the recasting. The face in your head was wrong, so the film is wrong. Fine. But there’s a harder version of the claim, and it’s the interesting one. Not the case where a bad film ruins a good book. The case where the film is genuinely good, respected, still watched, and the book still wins by a distance.

William Golding’s 1954 novel has been adapted for film twice — Peter Brook’s bleak 1963 version and Harry Hook’s muddled 1990 American take — and neither has held up as a definitive interpretation. Jack Thorne, who wrote Adolescence, now has a four-episode BBC series that landed on Netflix in the US on May 4, and critics are calling it the adaptation that may make all subsequent attempts unnecessary. The Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 91%.

Adapting One Hundred Years of Solitude was considered impossible for most of the decades since Gabriel García Márquez published it in 1967. The novel’s narrative structure — seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, with magical realism woven into the historical fabric so completely that separating them is not a meaningful operation — resists the conventions of visual storytelling in fundamental ways. The García Márquez estate spent decades refusing film rights.

Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures spent an extended period on bestseller lists largely through word of mouth — the kind of book readers press on other readers with an insistence that can be off-putting until you actually read it. The premise involves a widow working at an aquarium who forms an unlikely bond with an octopus named Marcellus. It is also a missing-persons mystery and a story about grief and the ways humans project emotional intelligence onto creatures who may or may not share it.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the first Hunger Games prequel, had the difficult task of making audiences care about a young Coriolanus Snow — the series’ established villain — without either redeeming him or making the film’s emotional investment incoherent. It largely succeeded, though it polarized readers of Suzanne Collins’s novel who felt the adaptation simplified the political argument the book was making. Sunrise on the Reaping, releasing November 2026, follows Haymitch Abernathy at sixteen during the 50th Hunger Games — the Second Quarter Quell, which is mentioned briefly in the original trilogy as the Games where twice the usual number of tributes were sent.

HBO’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights is being described, without apparent embarrassment, as the version that leans into what the novel was actually doing. Brontë’s 1847 text has always been more violent and erotic and structurally strange than its reputation as a tragic romance suggests — the relationship at its center is obsessive and destructive and explicitly includes class warfare, generational revenge, and a ghost. The sanitized versions have historically missed the point.