Michael Hofmann (Ed)
Granta, £25

Shalom Auslander
Picador, £16.99

Shalom Auslander's surname means "foreigner" in German, or "outsider". And that is certainly what he seems - a Jewish outsider alienated even from other Jews.

By Etgar Keret
(Trans: Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston and Nathan Englander)
Chatto & Windus, £12.99

By Michele Hanson
Simon & Schuster, £14.99

Michele Hanson's Guardian columns are a model of confessional journalism. She consistently entertains with accounts of home life with three generations and a dog living in the same house. A male figure, called Fielding, comes and goes, and a daughter, called "daughter" is a support and friend.

By Alexander Masters
Fourth Estate, £16.99

Alexander Masters' book is the most original biography I have read in a long time. It is relentlessly amusing, deeply complex, and far superior to its acclaimed precursor, Stuart, a Life Backwards. I am still delving into the pages, randomly selecting chuckle-worthy snatches of prose.

By Nathan Abrams
I. B. Tauris, £14.99

Nathan Abrams must have got through an awful lot of popcorn.

By David Landau in conversation with Shimon Peres
Schocken, £14.99

Jonathan Waxman's consulting room is a relaxing place - armchairs for the patients, a couch of the kind you might expect to see in a psychiatrists office… and a tropical fish-tank.

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010
Adrienne Rich
Norton, £19.99

Centuries of Skin
Joanna Ezekiel
Ragged Raven, £7

Turning
Adam Horovitz
Headland, £7.95

The Full Heritage Experience
Maureen Sandler, Helen Sandler and Rosie Sandler
Tollington, £8.99

The Assay
Yvonne Green

The Middle East conflict is not known for inspiring polite literary conversation. But among the piles of history books, novels and biographies in Joseph's Bookstore in north London, a bookish crowd is discussing Arab-Israeli relations, through the words of Muslim and Jewish authors.

Historians and academics still dispute the origins of the ancient game of chess.

The People of the Book

By Gertrude Himmelfarb
Encounter Books, £15.99

The Road to Apocalypse

By Stanley and Munro Price
Notting Hill Editions £12

By Steven Nadler
Princeton University Press, £20.95

Philosophers often get up the noses of their contemporaries. For having inveigled his fellow Athenians into philosophical discussion, Socrates was condemned to death, having in their eyes thereby corrupted the city's youth.

By Umberto Eco
Harvill Secker, £20

By Gilad Sharon
Harper, £24.99

There is an element of the surreal in the image conjured by his son of this once bluff, tough. roiling figure of a man now in the sixth year of a coma from which he is unlikely ever to emerge.

The Language of silence
By Merilyn Moos
Writersword, £11.99

Interpreters
By Sue Eckstein
Myriad Editions, £8.99

My Mother was Viennese
By Peter Flatter
Words By Design, £10

When journalists interview novelists, they invariably ask where the idea for a story came from. Almost as invariably, this is the question that novelists dislike most.