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

By nearly all accounts, Rio de Janeiro’s Summer Olympics were not as bad as they could have been. In spite of green pool water, Ryan Lochte’s lies, and terrible American TV ratings, there were a lot of people who made a lot of money. Brazillionaires, a recent journalistic account of Brazil’s billionaire class, is a capable and thorough examination of the kinds of Brazilians who profited from the Games. The book chronicles the accumulation, entrenchment, maintenance, and expansion of the country’s largest fortunes and business empires.

Advice is so much more enjoyable to give than it is to receive that its long flourishing as a genre—from the conduct books and periodicals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the current plethora of columns, livechats, and podcasts—could seem mysterious. Of course, watching other people being told what to do might be the most fun of all, which surely helps account for the enduring appeal of the advice column, and explains why living online seems only to enhance that appeal. Yet the genre is also unusual in the opportunities it offers a writer, in its combination of surprise

On a Saturday evening in July 2013, just before 6:30, James Rhodes was recorded on a surveillance camera walking into a Metro PCS cellphone store in Jacksonville, Fla. He was wearing a black do-rag and a blue bandanna, which he pulled over his nose and mouth. Shelby Farah, the store manager, stood behind the counter. Rhodes pointed a gun at her and demanded the money in the cash register. Shelby gave it to him. Then Rhodes shot her in the head. She was 20 years old. He was 21.

It feels a bit strange to say this now, but in the spring of 2014 there was no better place to work than Gawker. For a certain kind of person, at any rate — ambitious, rebellious, and eager for attention, all of which I was.

In a recent essay, the poet Solmaz Sharif lamented that so few contemporary American poets write about American wars. The reluctance to touch the topic, she thought, often came from a well-meaning humility: Unless the author has a personal experience with war, they think they can’t write it. Yet this demurral, Sharif wrote, paradoxically “drops the burden of actual critique on the survivors themselves,” or else leaves it “to vets and embedded journalists who invade and then get to write about their invading, doubling their power.”

There’s something daunting about the subtitle of Revulsion: Thomas Bernard in San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya and translated from Spanish by Lee Klein. For one thing, it presumes familiarity with the influential, congenitally grave Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. For another, it’s a mouthful. One thing it isn’t, though, is false advertising: Revulsion, Moya’s fifth book to be translated into English, is indeed a work of imitation—a tribute and a parody as well as an original voice. The book describes the “intellectual and spiritual misery” of 1990s San Salvador, the capital of a densely populated republic saddled with a corrupt,