This general issue of Mosaic focuses on the intersections of art and writing and the limits of art and the artist to engage with and represent the world. With essays looking at the visual poems of Michel Butor the aesthetic similarities of John Keats and Jan Vermeer, and the iconographic engagement with Freemasonry in William Blake, the issue also offers essays on Russian identity; food, puns, and the oral stage in Jonathan Swift; the tension between politics and aesthetics in Albert Camus; E.M. Forster’s mediation of faith, narrative, and modernity; and Aldous Huxley’s parody of Bertrand Russell.