When James Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, was published in 1999, the reviewers hailed a master critic. John Banville described Wood as a 'a close reader of genius-illuminating and exciting and compelling', and Malcolm Bradbury described him as 'a true critic: an urgent, impassioned reader of literature, a tireless interpreter, a live and learned intelligence'; Adam Begley, in the Financial Times, said that 'Wood is not just a keen critic, our best, but a superb writer'; in the Independent, Natasha Walter described The Broken Estate as 'a book that makes you feel, having closed it, as if your mind has been oxygenated'. The common thread in Wood's latest collection of essays is what makes us laugh - and the book is an attempt to distinguish between the perhaps rather limited English comedy (as seen in Waugh, for example) and a 'continental' tragic-comedy, which he sees as real, universal and quixotic. A particularly acerbic, and very funny, essay - which has been widely celebrated - deals with Zadie Smith, Rushdie, Pynchon and DeLillo; its title, 'Hysterical Realism', has already entered the phrasebook of literary language.

27/9/08

The French poet Pierre Martory is here published comprehensively for the first time in Britain. His formative impact on John Ashbery, and through Ashbery on a host of English-language poets, is considerable. "The Landscapist" provides a bilingual selection of the poems in Ashbery's luminous translations.

24/10/08 Amazon UK comparison price £15.95 inc p&P . For centuries churches have been a key part of the landscape of the world. In this fascinating book, David Stancliffe takes us back to the earliest churches, showing how they were conceived as spaces for worship. We see their historical development from the early Roman house churches, through Byzantine, Romanesque and on to Gothic.

OK, enough is enough. You spend your life running around after everyone else and never get a minute to yourself. It's easy to forget the things that really matter in life when you're knee-deep in laundry and chasing the guinea pig round the garden...Some people turn to self-help gurus or psychics, but how about some good old fashioned straight-talking from the Loose Women?