In Sloane Crosley's novel Cult Classic, protagonist Lola is swept up in an experiment run by a secret society called the Golconda: The society's leader has manufactured a way to induce many of Lola's ex-boyfriends to appear, one at a time, in downtown Manhattan, so that she can confront them and achieve closure. The society is named for the painting Golconda (1953) by René Magritte, which the leader has on loan in his conference room.

Magritte was a Belgian artist and one of the more prominent Surrealist painters. His most famous paintings are probably The Son of Man (1946), a self-portrait showing a man in a bowler hat, his face obstructed by a hovering green apple (one of the most iconic images of the Surrealism Movement), and The Treachery of Images (1929), a depiction of a pipe with the words "This is not a pipe" in cursive French underneath. According to Britannica, his "bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery." "Clouds, pipes, bowler hats, ...