Václav Havel’s life would seem to be an unrivalled success story: the Philosopher-King, a man who combines political power with a global moral authority comparable only to that of the Pope, the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela. And just as at the end of a fairy tale when the hero is rewarded for all his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress. Why, then, has John Keane chosen as the subtitle of his biography ‘A Political Tragedy in Six Acts’?

In late July, I flew to China not knowing what to expect, with one exception: I was sure, regrettably sure, that I wouldn't be able to speak with the person I needed to speak with, a man named Ai Weiwei. Who he is—and there's no shame in your not knowing; I was among the unenlightened until recently, too—it was my ambition to comprehend. And if I failed to meet the man himself, I hoped, at least, to see enough of the world he called his own to make sense of a matter of no small interest: why it is that not a few people of discernment now consider him to be one of the most significant artists

Christopher Middleton is a poet for our moment: angry, denunciatory, fed up with the status quo. But he’s not a young Occupier or Tea Party supporter. Middleton is an eighty-five-year-old Englishman living in Texas, and his most recent volume, A Company of Ghosts, is approximately his twenty-fourth book of poems. (Sometimes he publishes poetry and prose in the same volume, or publishes translations of other writers’ work alongside his own.) Middleton is a master of distinctly adult anger, free of clamor or whine, and the steady flame of it flares up repeatedly in A Company of Ghosts.

While

Hedy Lamarr is remembered most for the asset she valued least: her beauty. Richard Rhodes, himself best known for doorstop histories including 1986's The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is out to change that with Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr. The slim volume may not possess the gravity of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's four-part history of the nuclear age, but it certainly doesn't lack for charm or contemporary relevance. For in addition to being a legendary screen siren, Hedy Lamarr was an inventor whose contributions to the technology that now surrounds

Each book by Michael Ondaatje is, thrillingly, a departure, in some way unclassifiable. He is by no means a fantasist, but in the manner of a lyric poet (which he is also), he deploys juxtaposition and silence, as well as language and narrative, to create new worlds and new thoughts out of the real. Books like In the Skin of a Lion, Running in the Family, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost, and Divisadero are fictions that provoke and unsettle as much as, and even sometimes more than, they delight. In Ondaatje’s work, predictable boundaries are always in question: Is this poetry or prose? Fact