In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t good art.

-David Foster Wallace, quoted here