Early in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, a young man obsessed with suicide proposes a thought experiment: “Imagine a stone the size of a big house; it’s hanging there, and you are under it; if it falls on you, on your head—will it be painful?” That speculation never seems far from the mind of the great Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–87). Much of Drummond’s work—from the crystalline verse he assembled in career-making collections like Feeling of the World (1940), José (1942), and Rose of the People (1945) to the blustery, sometimes turgid material he produced further into his middle

Nations, like political creeds, can be upbeat or downbeat. Along with North Korea, the United States is one of the few countries on earth in which optimism is almost a state ideology. For large sectors of the nation, to be bullish is to be patriotic, while negativity is a species of thought crime. Pessimism is thought to be vaguely subversive. Even in the most despondent of times, a collective fantasy of omnipotence and infinity continues to haunt the national unconscious. It would be almost as impossible to elect a US president who advised the nation that its best days were behind it as it

Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world’s greatest living novelists, but, as Clive James wrote in Cultural Amnesia, his “true strength" is "undoubtedly in the essay. His collected essays written between 1962 and 1982, Contra viento y marea . . . makes the perfect pocket book for getting up to speed with how the bright baby-boom students of Latin America won their way towards a solid concept of liberal democracy.”

Liberal, in this case, is a relative term. In Vargas Llosa’s rich and funny 1993 memoir, A Fish in the Water, which described his 1990 presidential campaign, he wrote, “There was

The very title of this novel announces a departure for Matt Bell. Scrapper—with its homely brevity and flat vowels—stands in striking contrast to the Biblical roll of Bell’s 2013 In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. So too, more substantial elements in the new book reveal that its young author is going for something different. The house and lake of the previous novel had no fixed address, unfolding in a nightmare. But Scrapper at once places us in contemporary Detroit, “fifty years an American wreck.” A handful of chapters visit elsewhere, but the stay is always brief and

When he was eighteen, southern singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt was in a car accident that partially paralyzed him from the neck down. He had been drinking and flipped his car into a ditch; no one else was hurt. Chesnutt would never walk again, but about a year after the crash he regained limited use of his arms and hands—just enough to play a few simple chords on the guitar. “My fingers don’t move too good at all,” he told Terry Gross in a 2009 NPR interview. “I realized that all I could play were . . . G, F, C—those kinds of chords. And so . . . that’s what I was going to do.” Working within