The summer wasn’t meant to be like this. By April, Greene County, in southwestern Missouri, seemed to be past the worst of the pandemic. Intensive-care units that once overflowed had emptied. Vaccinations were rising. Health-care workers who had been fighting the coronavirus for months felt relieved—perhaps even hopeful. Then, in late May, cases started ticking up again.

In the first episode of HBO’s new miniseries The White Lotus, Shane (played by Jake Lacy) and his new wife, Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), arrive on their honeymoon, on an unspecified Hawaiian island, with bagfuls of silk resort-wear and books by Malcolm Gladwell. Alone in their suite, Jake moves in to kiss Rachel, but he’s suddenly gripped by a suspicion that all might not be entirely copacetic.

Joe Sanderson arrived in El Salvador as a white American traveler with ambitions of writing a novel. But during his journey, he became something else entirely: a revolutionary, fully enmeshed in the culture he’d set out to document. The journalist Héctor Tobar’s The Last Great Road Bum chronicles this transformation, interrupting Sanderson’s real journal entries with commentary from Tobar.

During the interview, I realized almost immediately that the woman was pregnant—I guessed she was about halfway along—but she didn’t remark on it, and of course neither did I. Over the phone, we’d discussed only her 3-year-old daughter. The woman, whose name was Diane, was looking for a babysitter for the girl, whose name was Sophie, two mornings a week from 9 a.m. to noon, for $10 an hour.

Illustrations by Vanessa SabaIf you want a preview of next year’s Emmy Awards, just take a walk past your local bookstore. According to data drawn from Publishers Marketplace, the industry’s clearinghouse for news and self-reported book deals, literary adaptations to television have been on a steady climb.