Just outside Ecuador's capital, a grand stone pillar marks the equator. It's called the Mitad del Mundo, the Middle of the World. By accident, it sits several hundred meters from the line it claims to mark. Tourists visit anyway.Like a lot of what reaches outsiders about Ecuador, the monument is a kind of agreed-upon fiction: convenient, photogenic, not quite true. The literature being written in the country today is something else altogether: stranger, mor...