How books become movies and TV shows

A guide to adaptation rights, aka "where sanity goes to die"

Despite all the times I’ve thought to myself that I want to throttle Jonathan Franzen, I have to admit that he knows how to write a sex metaphor. I still think all the time about the way Denise, his chef character in The Corrections, compares sex with her new lover to that with her dullard ex-husband.

With the lover—her boss’s wife—Denise’s orgasms are …