Paperbacks: Young AdamAislesThe Book of EelsThe Bad and the BeautifulThe Book of Illusions

Young Adam By Alexander Trocchi (CALDER £8.99)

Trocchi's cult novel was first published in 1954 by Olympia Press, the notorious Parisian imprint that specialised in pornography, but also published Naked Lunch and Lolita when no-one else would. Alexander Trocchi - the Glaswegian author who, apart from his work as a pornographer, also edited the influential literary magazine Merlin; hung out with Burroughs and Ginsberg in California; and dealt drugs and pimped his wife in order to maintain his heroin addiction - revised his first novel in 1961. But this shorter version, which Calder have reprinted to coincide with David MacKenzie's film adaptation, is still an unnervingly grubby little book, even if all the actual dirty bits have been cut out.

It begins with the narrator, Joe, and the skipper of the barge on which he works, Leslie, hauling the bloated corpse of a woman out of a Scottish canal: "It slopped softly and obscenely against the bilges." On this same morning, and it cannot be unrelated, Joe starts looking at Leslie's wife, Ella, in a new light. He notices little details such as the damp patch under her arm where the cotton of her green dress is discoloured: "a gradually paling yellow like a leaf in autumn".

Joe spends the next half of the book seducing her, although the reader, unlike Ella, is under no illusion that he'll still be interested in her once he's succeeded. When it emerges that he was in a relationship with the woman who's now a corpse and was in part responsible for her death, we discover that Joe doesn't feel bound by any of the conventions commonly held by what he thinks of as "an unintelligent society perennially bent on its moral purification".

The dour and dirty landscape that Joe passes through is as distant from the blazing sun of Algeria as it is possible to imagine, but as the trial of the innocent man accused of the murder begins, the parallels between Young Adam and Camus's L'Etranger mount up. But Joe lacks either the courage, stupidity or simply the inclination to be held responsible for the death of his ex-girlfriend, which makes him even more of a moral outsider than Meursault was. Or perhaps just more of a pragmatist, it's hard to tell.

Trocchi's philosophising can be clumsy and intrusive. I'm not convinced Joe is the kind of man who would have read Semiotics for Beginners. ("I know now that it is the structure of language itself which is treacherous.") But Trocchi has an eye for detail and his descriptive writing is powerful, so he's able to create an intensely oppressive and claustrophobic environment. Placing an absolute moral vacuum at the centre of it makes for a grimly fascinating spectacle.

Aisles By Paul Magrs (ALLISON & BUSBY £10.99)

This novel, by the director of the undergraduate creative writing course at the University of East Anglia, begins with Iris Murdoch turning up in an internet chatroom to discuss the afterlife with a professor of literature at that same university, and a bit of the story about Mrs Dalloway and Fu Manchu that said professor has written. So far, so painfully postmodern. But eventually it opens out into a panoramic vista of life in Norwich over the course of a week - a series of interconnected stories and domestic vignettes featuring a dozen or so characters whose lives intersect at the local branch of M&S, at the university, or in the aisles at Sainsbury's. They tend to be pretty unsympathetic when first introduced, but eventually they will all get the chance to describe their various hopes, fears and memories, many of which will be trivial but some of which may approach the profound - and all of them contributing towards a rich, prismatic view of modern suburban life. It can be moving, and except for the whole Iris Murdoch episode, it's not in the least bit trite. It's the sort of book in which a character can ask, "Is she his fancy woman?" without sounding contrived. And it contains the line, "Elsa thought heaven would be just like Stansted airport", which I unaccountably love.

The Book of Eels By Tom Fort (HARPERCOLLINS £7.99)

Rather naively, I'd supposed that Tom Fort's obsession with the two Atlantic species of eel, Anguilla anguilla and Anguilla rostrata, would be an unusual one, but as he documents at length here, the fish has been eaten by man since the Mesolithic era, and has fascinated fisherman, gourmands and scientists ever since. Aristotle is the first thinker known to have wondered about their lifecycle. Freud dissected 400 of them searching in vain for their reproductive organs, and scientists today are still trying to find out how, why, and by what route, when the time comes for them to mate, mature eels will travel up to 3,000 miles (over short spans of land if necessary) to a spot in the north of the Sargasso Sea. Or what happens to them once they've mated and the next generation of minute elvers are busy making their way to the fresh waters of Europe. The expeditions, theories and debates that have all contributed to what knowledge of the eel we have fill much of Fort's book, but he also includes some amiable accounts of his own encounters with the animal and with the few men who still fish for it, plus a short but eloquent lament for the state of its habitat, and a few recipes.

The Bad and the Beautiful By Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair (TIME WARNER £9.99)

This anecdotal but literate "Chronicle of Hollywood in the 1950s" begins with the story of the groundbreaking tabloid magazine Confidential and its Red-hunting, fantasist editor Howard Rushmore, who shot himself and his wife in the back of a taxicab in 1958. It sets the tone nicely, and the authors continue to quote liberally from the gossip columns as they recount Nicholas Ray's affairs with the cast of Rebel Without a Cause, Sammy Davis Jr and Kim Novak's secret affair, Lana Turner's abusive relationships, and all the other misdeeds and misfortunes of the many damaged stars, producers and writers whom the ailing studio system's publicity machine could no longer protect. It paints a portrait of an industry in turmoil: its profits eroded by television; its talent destroyed by McCarthyism, by the public's newfound insatiable appetite for scandal, and by just generally living in Hollywood. Kashner and MacNair are perceptive enough in what analysis they do offer of the decade's key films, paying particular attention to the ones in which Hollywood admitted it was a dark and dangerous place: Sunset Boulevard, The Sweet Smell of Success, Imitation of Life. But mainly they convince us that the most interesting stories 1950s' Hollywood has to offer happened off-screen.

The Book of Illusions By Paul Auster (FABER £7.99)

In Auster's latest bit of literary illusionism, he brings dead men back to life. Hector Mann was an emerging film star of the silent era who directed and starred in 12 two-reel comedies, before he disappeared without trace in 1929, presumed dead. David Zimmer, our narrator, had wished himself dead until he chanced upon a clip of Mann on TV, and it made him chuckle for the first time since his wife and child died in an aeroplane crash and he sank into a suicidal drunken torpor. Inspired to write the first critical study of Mann's work, David later comes to learn the whole improbable story of Mann's disappearance and afterlife. A book about grief, guilt, redemption, the cinema, the value of art and the creative process, this is also a detective story, a love story and a novel of ideas. As he unwraps successive layers of his tale Auster is entirely upfront about the artifice of his literary constructions, but his precise and fluid prose and the sheer boldness of his invention nevertheless keep you in his thrall. The Hector Mann films that David describes, for example, although they don't exist (even in David's world), seem as real to me as any of the silent comedies that I've actually seen.