Paperbacks: You're An Animal, Viskovitz!Non-FictionBeijing DollIn Search of the Pleasure PalaceMedusaJaney and Me: Growing Up With My Mother

Viskovitz is a preying mantis, losing his head over a girl, but enjoying a more prolonged sex life than most because he suffers from premature ejaculation.

You're An Animal, Viskovitz! by Alessandro Boffa (CANONGATE £6.99)

Viskovitz is a preying mantis, losing his head over a girl, but enjoying a more prolonged sex life than most because he suffers from premature ejaculation. He's a pig, dancing in a Chinese circus, a genetically enhanced lab-rat leading his people to the Shangri-La of the sewers, a chameleon suffering an identity crisis, a cuckoo who fears he's been cuckolded. In this utterly delightful debut collection, a kind of Just So Stories for grown-ups, Viskovitz is 20 different animals, always narrating in the first person, invariably in love with a female called Ljuba, and struggling to understand the nature of existence and their own Darwinistic impulses.

It's enormously funny and it can be absurdly poignant. As a virile teenager, Viskovitz the snail sets off running into the arms of the most beautiful snail he's ever seen, only to find, when he reaches her, that she was merely his own reflection. Luckily, he's middle-aged by then and hermaphrodite. It's also a playfully philosophical book: the single-celled organism Viskovitz who divides into V,I,S,K,O,V,I,T,Z finally halts the disintegration of his self when he holds on to his "I". And Viskovitz the fish has a Saussurean appreciation for the slipperiness of language. After all, it takes a 10-minute work-out to pronounce his name correctly and even then it could be mistaken for: "Certainly, if it's okay with your cousin."

Non-Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk (CAPE £10.99)

After Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club, wherever he went he'd have to explain to people who'd asked for directions to their nearest underground fighting club, that the clubs were about the only thing in the novel he'd made up. Most of his material comes from sitting in on support groups and group therapy sessions, ringing phone sex lines and visiting hospitals. That's why his fiction can feel so scarily authentic, and it's why these essays read so much like his fiction. There's a bit of literary criticism (Amy Hempel, Ira Levin), a couple of interviews (Juliette Lewis, Marilyn Manson) and some personal pieces about the murders of his father and grandmother. But mostly these are essays in which Palahniuk hangs out with some of America's more weird, desperate or damaged people. There's that familiar clipped prose and little in the way of analysis, commentary or sociology. It's more akin to anthropology.

He goes to the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Montana where hundreds gather to perform the wildest public sex shows, just for the honour of competing. To amateur wrestling meets and bodybuilders' gyms, to a submarine and to a combine-harvester demolition derby. It's sporadically compelling, in a car-crash kind of way, but even more than with other authors' essay collections, it feels like leftovers which weren't good enough for his novels.

Beijing Doll by Chun Sue (ABACUS £6.99)

This semi-autobiographical novel, that the author pasted together from her diaries when she was 17, was apparently banned and a bestseller in China (don't ask me how that works) where it was heralded as the authentic voice of a new generation. Chun Sue, aged 15, sporadically attends a secretarial college where students are taught to be disciplined, dignified and refined. Her classmates' conformism makes her "so goddamned disgusted I felt like puking". Instead, she spends her time going to punk rock concerts, interviewing bands for local magazines and having sex with penniless poets and musicians.

Episodic and affectless, Beijing Doll is like a high school version of Less Than Zero, which Bret Easton Ellis wrote when he was still a student too. Their protagonists travel aimlessly around their social circles, searching for meaning, expressing themselves through their hairstyles and mistaking vapid rock lyrics for profundities. Beijing Doll is a far tamer book and Sue's character is less degenerate than Ellis's. He was beyond redemption, while Chen Sue adapts herself in an effort to please whichever callous young man she's with, without ever knowing what it is they want. It's a relief to think that most of her angst, self-loathing and poor taste in music and men will probably soon be gone. Sad though, that most of her intensity, guilelessness and lyricism will go with it.

In Search of the Pleasure Palace by Marc Almond (SIDGWICK & JACKSON £12.99)

The onset of Marc Almond's midlife crisis was sudden and came during a performance he was giving on what I'm fairly sure I recognise (to my great shame) as Open House with Gloria Hunniford. Later, the man who'd introduced gay S&M imagery to a mainstream audience with pop records like "Sex Dwarf" and "Last Night in Sodom", found himself at a swingers party in Croydon where, watching a man ejaculate, he found himself thinking how nice it would be to have Carnation milk for tea.

To help him decide whether he wished to continue performing in a voyeuristic and superficial media circus, he revisited the places that had given him his inspiration. So mostly this book is a guided tour of gay sex clubs, brothels, porn cinemas and cabaret shows in Europe and New York. This time he's older, sober and merely a wry spectator. In Paris he realises that he's become more interested in romance than sex. He wants Piaf, Josephine Baker, outdoor cafés and accordions, rather than the internal inspection that a young man wearing latex gloves offers him.

Almond is, if not a great writer, at least a frank and campily entertaining one. He arrives at predictable conclusions about himself, but there is a lot of fun to be had in the journey. And he's grown older more gracefully than we could ever have expected.

Medusa by Michael Dibdin (FABER £6.99)

The action in Dibdin's ninth Aurelio Zen book takes place in Rome, Milan, Verona, Campione, Lucca and the Dolomites, where cavers discover a corpse which has been preserved for more than 20 years. Or, more accurately, much of the book takes place in the detective's head as he sits on trains and in cars travelling between those places, ruminating on the case, thinking barbed thoughts about the social and political climate in Berlusconi's Italy, or more often than not, simply admiring the passing scenery which, as ever, is a major feature of Dibdin's book. It gives you something to enjoy while he ever so slowly sets his plot in motion.

The corpse has had all its identifying marks removed, except - a major oversight by the baddies - the tattoo of a gorgon which links it with a paramilitary cell of the 1970s. When it is removed from the morgue by the Carabinieri, Zen's boss at the Interior Ministry senses a cover-up and sends Zen to dig up some dirt.

Zen's enjoyably cynical, truculent and tenacious character was established long ago and, though he has a rather implausibly tolerant new girlfriend in this one, there's little room left in which to develop it. Dibdin compensates by focusing equally on the other major players in the plot, and most of all by giving the Italian national character a leading role.

Janey and Me: Growing Up With My Mother by Virginia Ironside (HARPER PERENNIAL £7.99)

Janey Ironside was a fashion icon, a woman ahead of her times, dressmaker to the stars and to royalty, a part of the revolution in the post-war fashion industry at a time when most women still stayed at home. Later, as Professor of Fashion at the Royal Collage of Art in the 1960s, she created a New English Look, schooled Ossie Clark and for a time was at the very centre of the fashion world. The problem for her daughter Virginia was simply that: "If you are an icon, you just cannot, I think, be a mother." Stylish, brittle, insecure, and emotionally unavailable, she was a depressive alcoholic who twice attempted suicide.

Even worse for Virginia, who's herself a very prolific and successful writer who swung with the best of them as a rock critic in the 1960s, when she looks in the mirror she sees Janey looking back and when she opens her mouth she hears her mother's expressions. "How ghastly." "Frightfully embarrassing." She also recounts here her own struggles with depression and alcohol. And what's most refreshing about her memoir is that she refuses to offer the catharsis that's typical of the genre, finding herself at the end of it just as confused, resentful, guilty and in the shadow of her mother as she was at the beginning. It's simply a very sad story, albeit one bejewelled with romance and glamour, told well and with honesty and dignity.