What makes an adaptation good? The New Yorker movie critic Richard Brody tackled the question earlier this week, as arguments about Christopher Nolan’s fidelity to Homer’s Odyssey continue. Brody proposes a taxonomy of five types of literary adaptation—ranging from “close” to “unrecognizable”—and argues that each can produce cinematic brilliance.
The essay got us thinking about the stories that found their way from the pages of The New Yorker to the big screen. Today, we’re sharing six notable examples, from across the decades. Sometimes the end result bore strong similarities to the source material, as when the director Ang Lee captured the aching tragedy of Annie Proulx’s cowboy romance “Brokeback Mountain.” And sometimes—just ask Susan Orlean—things got weird. | 
