Paperbacks: The Complete Polysyllabic SpreeServe the People!Ten-Second StaircaseConsider the Lobster and Other EssaysLisey's Story

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby (Penguin £7.99)

The Polysyllabic Spree (after the Polyphonic Spree, a white-robed pop group who look like happy-clappy cultists) is Nick Hornby's name for the editorial board of the US literary monthly The Believer – a magazine that, unusually, makes it a policy to carry only favourable coverage of books. Not surprisingly, Hornby, with his convivial prose style and unpretentious tastes, turned out to be its ideal columnist.

He propounds a reader-centric artistic relativism in which, say, Dan Brown is as valid as Julian Barnes, if not more so. It's not so much that Hornby doesn't enjoy literary novels, but that they're trumped by those books that have the qualities of a literary novel but can still make you walk into a lamp post while reading them.

There is an anti-intellectual strain running through this collection, then, that will turn some readers against it, but probably only the really intellectual ones. For the rest of us, Hornby's arguments are of the common-sensical kind that is actually difficult to counter. For example, he argues for the implementation of the "Dickens-standard for the appropriate length of a literary biography", based on the fact that, actually, no one wants to read a literary biography of more than 1,000 pages, which length should be reserved for Dickens, and that all biographies of less significant writers should be correspondingly shorter. It may sound absurd, but who can honestly say they haven't grown impatient when, by page 100 of a biography, they're still reading about its subject's grandparents? And any critic who is as equally impassioned by Chekhov's letters and Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels, and, what's more, can make the reader want to rush out and buy both, has to be worth reading.

Serve the People!, by Yan Lianke (Constable £6.99)

At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, a young peasant soldier, Wu Dawang, by dint of his remarkable industry, unswerving obedience to his superiors and dedication to the cause of the Communist Party, has been promoted to the rank of General Orderly in the household of a Division Commander. To serve the Commander and his wife is to Serve the People – one of Mao's most famous and oft-repeated edicts. But the Commander is away at a two-month symposium and the kind of servicing that his bored younger wife is after is liable to get poor Wu into a lot of trouble. Especially once their affair progresses to the point where they begin exploring together the erotic thrill of desecrating sacred symbols of the Party: tearing up the Little Red Book and even urinating on pictures of Mao.

Yan Lianke has won both of China's two top literary prizes, but he has also had two of his novels banned. This is one of the latter. A very funny, and sexy, satire, only slightly marred by the self-consciousness of the narrative and its frequent direct addresses to the reader.

Ten-Second Staircase, by Christopher Fowler (Bantam £7.99)

In the case of a locked-room mystery – for instance, the discovery of a murdered contemporary artist floating in her own installation in County Hall, from where no one could have come or gone without being seen, and indeed there is a witness but he thinks the culprit was a mounted highwayman – it's best to assign Bryant and May, the octogenarian detectives from the Met's Peculiar Crimes Unit. Not only will their idiosyncratic methods yield results – they have, after all, been solving similar cases together since the Forties – but they'll also be able to share with you the entire history of County Hall and associated snippets of arcane London lore and legend while they're at it.

Christopher Fowler's Bryant and May mysteries, of which this is the fourth, pay respectful homage to the golden age of detective fiction, but are unconventional in every other way, tending to delve into the mythological, semi-supernatural and esoteric. This one is the most satisfyingly plotted, but, as always, the pleasure of it is in the incidental detail and in the characterisation of the irascible, anachronistic detectives.

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, by David Foster Wallace (Abacus £8.99)

John Updike's decline, Franz Kafka's sense of humour, the Dictionary of American Usage and Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoyevsky; the adult entertainment industry's annual awards ceremony and the Maine lobster festival; tennis star Tracy Austin, John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, right-wing talk radio and 9/11: these are the topics under discussion in David Foster Wallace's second collection of long-form essays, dating from 1998 to the present. But, compulsively digressive and polymath writer that he is, all aspects of language and of American culture, politics and economics are up for discussion, and much of the really interesting stuff is in the footnotes. Or the footnotes to the footnotes.

Wallace's intense fascination with the detail and texture of American life may not be shared by all his British readers, but the elegance of his prose will keep them reading. He is eloquent, scathing, precise and very funny. How's this, for example, for a description of the 1998 Adult Video News awards: "Imagine that the apocalypse took the form of a cocktail party"?

Lisey's Story, by Stephen KingHodder £6.99

Two years after the death of her husband of 25 years, the Pulitzer prize-winning horror writer Scott Landon, Lisey brings herself to enter his study and begin the daunting task of sifting through his papers. It sets her to sifting through her memories, too, and a majority share of the 650 pages of King's latest novel is devoted, in flashback, to an affectionate portrait of a successful marriage and an examination of the way that binding ties are woven from shared experiences and a private language. The rest is about Lisey's relationship with her four sisters, her very frightening stalker and Boo'ya Moon. This last is a place in a parallel world to which Scott Landon had been retreating since childhood, when the horrors of his upbringing got to be too much, and from which he would return with fresh stories to write; a place with dark woods where a monster lives, but also a lake in which to fish for ideas

Lisey's Story is the product of an imagination as vivid as it ever was, and King even just about manages the trick of rendering the collective unconscious as a believable, physical exterior landscape. But really, it's a needlessly overlong novel, made to feel even more so by the overuse of Lisey's folksy, infantile idiom.

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