Paperbacks: Calcium Made Interesting The Weight of NumbersStrangeland The Mechanics' Institute Review The Truth (With Jokes) Shalimar the Clown

Calcium Made Interesting by Graham Chapman, ed Jim Yoakum (PAN £7.99)

Long before anyone had thought to describe comedy as "the new rock and roll", Graham Chapman was causing havoc in hotel rooms with his drinking buddy Keith Moon, and Monty Python were touring America and selling out the Hollywood Bowl as if they were the Beatles. And if they had been, then Graham Chapman would have been John Lennon, his irreverence and absurdism providing the brightest creative spark within the group.

This compendium includes unfilmed, and probably quite unfilmable, sketches (how does one commit to celluloid the stage direction "a corridor, fairly butch") which stack disconnected layers of oddness into dizzyingly high towers, then gleefully remove the foundations. More interesting, though, are the letters, lectures and essays revealing the breadth of Chapman's interests and his permanently askance view of life. In between the earnestness of some of his lectures and essays about the British press, medical science and the emerging gay rights movement, and the throwaway absurdism of "A Letter to God's Parents" or the title piece ("Calcium, an alkaline belonging to group 2A of the periodic table, has large breasts"), are artfully composed angry letters to his bank manager, pieces detailing his involvement with the Dangerous Sports Club, letters of apology to establishments where he'd misbehaved, and countless other miscellaneous scraps of paper that prove his adventurous, mischievous and sometimes self-destructive streaks, were entirely ingrained and needed negotiating with on a daily basis.

The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings (ATLANTIC £7.99)

Spanning several generations and touching down in every continent as well as taking in the view of the Earth from space, The Weight of Numbers is one of those weighty novels that has a go at describing the complexity of our globalised information age. It is dense with information and its decentralised plot is a web of connections, so that an allusion to the HTML and information overload of the internet, that most potent symbol of the interlinked craziness of our times, seems woven into its very fabric.

One of its characters is a postwar Cambridge information theorist who bumps into Alan Turing and prophesises global information networks. Others include a Zelig-like character who pops up during the CIA's invasion of Cuba and the civil war in Zimbabwe, a former Grange Hill child actress turned anorexic Hollywood star and performance artist, a synaesthetic Nippy at a Lyon's teashop in the Blitz, Jim Lovell, when he was an astronaut and also later, after Tom Hanks played him in Apollo 13, cashing in on his celebrity at a Nasa-themed restaurant.

The scale of Ings's ambition is proportionally matched by the precision of his prose. Every sentence, image and line of dialogue is balanced and true. It isn't its clever design or technical achievement that makes it compelling so much as its beating human heart. What it most reminded me of was Short Cuts, Robert Altman's adaptation of Raymond Carver's short stories as a tapestry of linked stories about people's regrets, faded dreams and last-ditch attempts to make meaningful human contact.

Strangeland by Tracey Emin (SCEPTRE £7.99)

Where Tracey Emin's obsessively confessional airing of dirty laundry seemed singularly bold within the art world, these autobiographical fragments arrive in a literary marketplace already saturated with memoirs of difficult childhoods, sexual abuse, promiscuity, alcoholism and recovery. Not only have we heard Tracey tell these stories before but also plenty of other writers, and her tendency to lapse into the third person and strive for a universal, if not mythic, tone only makes Strangeland seem the more generic.

The quality of her writing might surprise those who bought into the persona of the naive and untutored raw talent that she constructed for herself as an artist. Her pared-down sentences and instinct for the telling detail are crudely effective. The sting of a playground taunt, the warmth of a post-coital bag of chips, the fact that it was a Burton's shoe shop on the corner of the alley where she was raped as a teenager: her mostly miserable Margate upbringing is well drawn, albeit along familiar lines.

In later sections she visits her father in Cyprus and reconnects to a more romantic and exotic aspect of her personal history, then moves to London where it's all booze and abortions again. Strangeland ostensibly brings us right up to the present day, but there's next to nothing about Emin's life as an artist or public figure. Such gaps are typical of a book which appears to offer full disclosure but only really shows us those well-rehearsed aspects of Tracey we've seen before.

The Mechanics' Institute Review issue 3 (BIRKBECK £7.99)

The third annual collection of stories produced by students and graduates of Birkbeck (formerly the Mechanical Institute) college's creative writing MA course is the usual assortment of competent to extremely good stories, with a varied range of voices, styles and milieus. Occasionally their roots as formal exercises or homework assignments still seem to be showing; you imagine Franco Torrano was asked to "tell a story from the point of view of a pet or caged animal", for example, leading to her story "Black Velvet" about sentient chinchillas witnessing their owners' domestic problems. Two surrealism-tinged stories by John Braime and Jamie Joseph could have originated from the same source, though they are each very funny and sad in their own ways.

For the most part, there is scant formal experimentation or flashiness; instead a number of simple, quietly affecting linear narratives about significant moments in people's lives. Maggie Womersley's "Shoes That Match", about a woman buying a pair of boots on her way to visit her mother in hospital for the last time, is perceptive about love and guilt within mother-daughter relationships, and Lemanis Samanis does the same thing with fathers in "Coffee Grounds".

The collection includes some already established names connected with the course (Lisa Appignanesi, TC Boyle, Courtia Newland) to attract new readers. But it's for the pleasure of hearing distinct new voices that they should find this collection most attractive.

The Truth (With Jokes) by Al Franken (PENGUIN £8.99)

I'm afraid I can find precious little to laugh about in Franken's by now familiar story of how George W Bush, with the complicity of a right-wing biased media, capitalised on the American public's fear in the wake of 9/11 in order to wage war on Iraq, distract attention from his inegalitarian social and economic policies at home, and get himself re-elected in 2004. So it's entirely a measure of the former Saturday Night Live star and future Senate candidate's skill as a comedic writer that The Truth (With Jokes) is as funny as it is. Withering sarcasm might be his preferred mode, but arguments reductio ad absurdum and plain old insults work for him too: whatever it takes to keep his thorough, oftenpedantic, deconstruction of Republican rhetoric and strategy from becoming too dull or depressing.

Many of his allusions and asides will be lost on the non-American reader, although when in doubt you can usually assume it's another of those self-righteous right-wing talkshow hosts that Franken has just put in his place. The chapters he spends analysing the intricacies of Bush's tax code, or deconstructing election build-up talking points, can drag. But the gist is clear: Bush is lazy, dim, incompetent and self-serving, his presidency has been nothing but bad news for the average American, and it took a campaign of disgustingly dirty tricks and Orwellian levels of propaganda to get him re-elected.

The one cause for optimism is that, as he shows, the Republican Party has so repeatedly shown its true colours since the election that they surely won't get another go.

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie (VINTAGE £7.99)

In his post-fatwa journalism Salman Rushdie has directly engaged with the contemporary political climate. In Shalimar the Clown he comes as close as he's likely to in his novels to confronting the spectre of fundamentalism and global terrorism head on. But it is as much a novel about family, art, Western culture, folklore, post-colonial Indian and Pakistani history and politics, and, more than anything else, Rushdie's own dazzling intellect and wordplay.

Shalimar, a traditional performing clown, was married to Boonyi, a Hindu, on the day Pakistan's army crossed into Kashmir. But it isn't that his country, "this earthly paradise", is torn apart by sectarian violence between India and Pakistan, or even that his interfaith marriage puts him in an awkward position when Kashmiris are forced to choose sides, that turns his blood cold. Rather, it is that he is cuckolded by Max Ophuls - not the film director but America's visiting ambassador to India and later her chief counter-terrorism expert. The revenge he eventually enacts in America is a purely personal one.

The problem isn't so much that Rushdie's plot is schematic as that his characters are mere archetypes. His own authorial voice, with all its attendant witticisms ("California whose body was its temple and whose ignorance was its bliss") and flourishes ("If the hornet of death were buzzing nearby right now this demonstration of clock-stopping physical prowess would surely draw its sting") entirely dominates the narrative. This being the case, I think I'd rather stick to his journalism.