This weekend Paul Thomas Anderson premiered his new film, One Battle After Another, loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. Revisiting the book five years ago, Peter Coviello observed that it was hard “to avoid feeling that it is unnervingly prescient”:

Strange, you might think reading it today, I don’t recall the early nineties as a time of especially acute antifascism. But there it is…. There are stark and distressing clarities on offer—about economy and security, about the bringing of militarized counterinsurgency back to the metropole, and above all about what the novel unblinkingly calls “the true nature of the police.” These, with each new day, seem a little more vivid, a little more goddamn realist, and a little less the stuff of stoned counterfactual invention.

For more from our archive on the literature of repression, read Henry Farrell on why we live in Philip K. Dick’s dystopia, not Aldous Huxley’s or George Orwell’s; Stephen Phelan—in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates—on E. L. Doctorow’s premonitions of “violence, poverty, inequity, and plutocratic rule”; Peter Filkins on Austrian philosopher-poet and staunch antifascist Ingeborg Bachmann; Leland de la Durantaye on Italo Calvino, who fought fascists in World War II and issued a clarion call for responsibility in a “torn-apart world”; Tyler Curtis on the bleak portrayals of state repression in the novels of East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig; and Anjuli Raza Kolb on Palestinian writer Emile Habiby’s depictions of “those who stay and survive in inhospitable places.”