Paperbacks: ScandalAnna of all the Russias Stories We Could TellIn My Skin: a memoir Animals in TranslationParenthesis: the next in text

Scandal by Shusaku Endo, trs Van C Gessel (PETER OWEN £10.95)

Although it was one of Shusaku Endo's last novels,Scandal would be a sensible starting place for anyone newly discovering Endo because he styled it as an "I-novel" (Watakushi-shosetsu). As dictated by the conventions of this Japanese literary genre, Endo's narrator is closely modelled on himself. Suguro is a celebrated 65-year-old Catholic-Japanese novelist with failing health and the nagging feeling that he's running out of time in which to write a novel that truly lays bare the core of his being. At the start of Scandal, he's attending a literary awards ceremony when he glimpses an apparition of his doppelganger, with a lecherous leer on its face. Then a woman he doesn't know implies that she recognises him from a street-corner in Shinjuku, a seedy district of Tokyo. At first appalled that anyone could think he'd be found in that part of town, through the course of the book he's inexorably drawn there, only to find that his doppelganger is already well known.

Endo's Catholicism and tireless grappling with the nature of guilt, sin, love and redemption, as well as the effortlessly luminous quality of his prose, meant that the writer he was most routinely compared with in the west was Graham Greene. But with its unsettling, dreamlike mood, playful self-referentiality and ingeniously engineered plot mechanics - Suguro is shown at his writing desk "hunched like a watchmaker" - Scandal might more usefully be compared to one of Paul Auster's metaphysical detective stories.

Anna of all the Russias by Elaine Feinstein (PHOENIX £9.99)

Born near Odessa in 1889, Anna Akhmatova lived through the two Russian revolutions, the two World Wars and Stalin's oppression, chronicling her experiences in poetry. Her first collection was published when she was 18, and she'd soon joined with the Acmeism school of poetry, who denounced mysticism and symbolism in favour of concise and lucid depictions of everyday reality. By her early twenties, she'd become the darling of the Stray Dog club, the bohemian cellar dwelling-place of St Petersburg's artists.

According to the poet Adamovich, "she was better than beautiful. A woman whose expressiveness and genuine unworldliness set her apart anywhere." She was painted by Modigliani and Nathan Altman, she had three husbands and many more propositions and affairs, and Feinstein dedicates the larger portion of her book to anatomising her love life. As well as a turbulent personal life, she publicly suffered her share of her country's trauma. She was denounced and silenced by the Party for nearly 20 years, her first husband was executed, her third died in the gulags and her son was sent to Siberia. But always she evinced, in her life and her poems, a quiet and stoical dignity. "I experienced great fame, I experienced great disgrace and I have come to the conclusion that, in essentials, it's all the same."

Feinstein translated herself the excerpts of Akhmatova's poetry she quotes, but doesn't do enough to make it come alive for us, or allow us to use it as a conduit to the poet. She does make Akhmatova seem alive, though.

Stories We Could Tell by Tony Parsons (HARPERCOLLINS £6.99)

That the iconoclastic critic and columnist who chronicled punk rock for the NME as a callow, working-class youth later grew up to be the author of a set of bestselling novels about bourgeois family life, rather confounds his critics. In Stories We Could Tell, Tony Parsons has a go at reconciling his two personas, it being the story of three youths working on the staff of a music paper during the punk era, who grow up in the course of a night.

Symbolically, the night in question is August 16, 1977, the night Elvis died. Terry, the character most obviously modelled on the young Parsons, loves his salt-of-the-earth parents, even while he's jetting off to Berlin to hang out with Iggy Pop-alike Dag Wood. Leon lives in a squat to show his solidarity with the oppressed: punk and the Lewisham riots have energised and politicised him, but later tonight he'll discover love and disco. And Ray is a long-haired misfit who'll lose his job unless he bumps into John Lennon tonight and secures an interview. Luckily for him, Parsons' schematic plots tend to prioritise tidy resolution ahead of believability.

Parsons gets his characters' wide-eyed passion and naïve view of the world about right, but their self-knowledge is too cheaply earned and thus mawkish. And while he namechecks all the right bands and brands and is very careful to elaborate on all the socio-political currents flowing though the air, his recreation of the era still seems as artificial and unsubstantial as a style-mag's photoshoot.

In My Skin: a memoir by Kate Holden (CANONGATE £9.99)

That Kate Holden grew up in a nice suburb of Melbourne amid a nice, liberal, middle-class family who cherished her has no apparent bearing on the fact that she spent her twenties as a junkie and a prostitute. So, in her abrasive but coruscating memoir, she sketches in her back story quickly, then gets straight to the point where she allows heroin to seduce her. By page 21, she's hooked, her aspirations to a creative, beautiful life fade away and her ambition is diminished to the size of her next fix. Her non-user friends drift away and she runs out of people to "borrow" money from. Rehab doesn't stick. So, choosing to think of it as a potentially liberating and glamorous adventure, she goes on to the street and offers her body for sale to the passing cars.

Baldly outlining the economics of addiction and male desire - the men are always trying to get more than they've paid for and there's always a junkie desperate enough to give it to them - she records every degrading request, unpleasant taste and painful bruise. Her road to recovery begins when she starts working in a brothel. The clients seem to fit the same distribution curve - brutish at one end, sweet at the other - but now that the trade is coming to her, she draws strength from the power of her allure, starts to take pride in her work, and discovers that she's good at it. This surprising trajectory, along with its searing intellectual and emotional honesty and the quality of the writing, easily sets In My Skin apart from most other my-substance-abuse-hell memoirs. The only problem is that it all too well conveys the mind-numbing monotony of addiction.

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson (BLOOMSBURY £8.99)

The titular anthropologist on Mars from Oliver Sacks' book about illuminating neurological disorders, Temple Grandin is a successful animal scientist, writer, lecturer and consultant to the meat industry who realised that her autism gives her a rare affinity with animals.

It looks as though human language is not of a separate order to animal communication, merely a different order of complexity. Grandin insists that the real difference between us isn't language but abstraction. Animals live in the present tense, keenly sensing the world around them, but not thinking about it very much afterwards. They're visual rather than verbal thinkers and don't suffer the distraction of that self-conscious running commentary that's ongoing in all our heads. Grandin's own non-verbal thinking and her inability to filter the sometimes overwhelming sensory data her brain receives, are advantages when it comes to seeing the world as an animal does. As a result, she's been able to advance greatly our theoretical understanding of animals, and improved the practical handling of them. She redesigned the humane slaughter system currently in place to kill most of our cattle by visiting slaughterhouses and literally putting herself in the cows' place.

From what she tells us of how her mind works, it's no surprise that her endlessly fascinating book - part memoir, part animal behaviourism and neuroscience lecture, part animal welfare manifesto - is a model of logical, insightful, lucid and practical thinking. The pleasant surprise is its chatty and companionable tone.

Parenthesis: the next in text, ed Ra Page (COMMA £7.95)

The second short-story anthology from Comma, the Manchester-based, non-profit publishing group with an open submissions policy, again introduces new writers and creative writing graduates, many of whose poised and ingenious stories announce them as names to look out for.

In lieu of a unifying theme, Ra Page has selected stories which all niggle, stories "that aren't quite right in a short-story-shaped way". Which is to say that they all create their own little worlds. They have the kind of twists you can only get away with in short fiction, and the kind of potent imagery or condensed meaning that makes a story carry on vibrating after you've put it down.

Adam Marek's intense three-minute monster movie Testicular Cancer vs the Behemoth juxtaposes a personal disaster with a more widespread mayhem. Pat Winslow's Kafkaesque Static puts its characters in a strange, hermetic workplace and gives them an absurd and pointless job to do. At the other end of the scale, Gabriella Reed's Heisenberg's Uncertainty and Graham English's The Rats are straightforwardly realist, domestic miniatures in the style of Carver, in which painful truths are offset, and need only be alluded to.

A few relationships begin, a couple falter and several unravel. There is violence in this collection - paedophilia and self-mutilation, train crashes and plane bombings - but only rarely does it feel gratuitously appropriated. There would've been room for more laughs, but then isn't that always so? As a collection, it reasserts and cherishes the short story form's ingrained oddness, its unique kind of drama and its potential to surprise.