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

As Occupy encampments across the country come under attack and are raided or threatened by local authorities, everyone is asking what’s going to happen now that protesters have been forcibly expelled from public space.

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less.

Some years ago, while I was interviewing a cordial octogenarian for my biography of André Breton—often called, to his disgust, the “Pope of Surrealism”—my interviewee suddenly leaned across the table and threatened to give me “a sound thrashing” if I used the abhorred word pope in my book. I did include the term, of course, but not without trepidation—a fear that had little to do with the outrage of vengeful codgers and everything to do with disappointing those whose trust I’d spent years courting. It’s a quandary for any biographer, particularly when writing about a figure who still inflames the

When riots convulsed working-class communities throughout Britain this summer, the predominant reflex in the English media was to lash out at the rioters as criminals, thugs, and hooligans, engaged in senseless destruction for destruction’s sake. To be sure, there was plenty of unhinged mayhem, especially once the unrest entered the looting and fire-setting phase. But to write off the uprisings—which started at the end of a peaceful Tottenham vigil in protest of the police killing of a black man named Mark Duggan—as the “mindless” conduct of individual bad actors, as the general run of commentary did, was to ignore decades

In his new book of essays, Sweet Heaven When I Die, Jeff Sharlet recounts a tête-à-tête between writers William Hogeland and Greil Marcus over the subject of Dock Boggs, a folk singer-turned-coal miner who was rediscovered and canonized during the 1960s folk revival. Marcus described Boggs as “a seer” and “the prophet of his own life.” Hogeland responded that “prophecy and darkness are the products of the critic’s own romantic inclinations,” and not due to any inherently noble splendor in Boggs’s journey through the violence and deprivation of southwestern Virginia’s coal country.

In his chatty and astute new memoir, musician and super-producer Nile Rodgers recounts the inspiration for one of his most enduring songs. In 1979, he was in a crowded dive bar’s bathroom with a couple of Diana Ross impersonators when he wondered, “What would it be like if Diana celebrated her status among gay men in a song?” Rodgers, who was the core of the disco band Chic along with bassist Bernard Edwards, realized that the Motown diva could speak to her gay fans with a knowing wink—and the Ross classic “I’m Coming Out” was born.

With early Tuesday’s abrupt evacuation of Zuccotti Park, the City of New York has managed—for the moment—to dislodge protesters from Wall Street. But it will be much harder to turn attention away from the financial excesses of the very rich—the problems that have given Occupy Wall Street such traction. Data on who is in the top 1 percent of earners further reinforces their point. Here’s why.