By Paul Simon
Simon & Schuster, £20

For more than 40 years, a short, Jewish New Yorker has been steadily turning out some of the greatest lyrics and music of our age, painting sharp and pithy word-pictures in that most ephemeral of things, the perfect pop song.

By Max Blecher (Trans: Henry Howard)
Old Street Publishing, £14.99

In his notebooks, Paul Klee wrote the following: “To stand despite all possibilities to fall.” He was referring to a tree, but he could equally well have been thinking about the human race, each member of which lives life balanced upon an invisible tight-rope.

The characters in Max Blecher’s newly resurrected novel (translated with great sensitivity by Henry Howard) have already fallen, but are not yet dead. Mortally damaged, they exist in some intermediary stage.

By Alan Coren (eds: Giles Coren and Victoria Coren)
Canongate, £20

The late Alan Coren and I used to live either side of Hampstead Cemetery. It was a favourite walk for both of us. Alan lived on the uber-expensive Hocroft Estate, where houses sell for uber-millions, and called it Cricklewood. I live in West Hampstead and call it East Kilburn. We both earned our daily bread writing humorously for various mediums.

By Emma Gilbey Keller
Bloomsbury, £18.99

You've got to admire Emma Gilbey Keller's chutzpah. Here we are on the cliff-edge of a major recession with job security eroding faster than the Norfolk coastline and out she comes, enjoining the sisterhood not to abandon their professional ambitions.

Professional ambitions? Remember them? The things you had in abundance before you had children and ran out of time, energy and, well, let's face it, ambition.

By Jackie Wullschlager
Allen Lane, £30

Brightly coloured lovers flying over Russian rooftops; synagogues and rabbis; violinists; the odd donkey or two: few artists have a more easily recognisable style than Marc Chagall.

The American Future: A History
By Simon Schama
The Bodley Head, £20

Stephen Fry in America
By Stephen Fry
HarperCollins, £20

Pressing deadlines demand fast food, which is why Stephen Fry's book is only half-baked. Even so it contains a lot of plums. The guest of a nonagenarian Georgia matriarch named (I kid you not) Mrs Nancy Schmoe, Fry is required to mount a Tennessee Walking Horse, which promptly belies its appellation by bolting.

Reading Dershowitz (pictured below), it is easy to summon to mind the hero-knights of legend defending the drawbridge against an attacking mob of sword-waving and axe wielding assailants. Clashing his steel against theirs, he lunges here with a flash of forensics, there with a slash of semantics until, one by one, he reduces all about him to a bloodied pile.