The Guardian's Blog, page 168

The best books on Libya: start your reading here

The rule and downfall of Gaddafi feature strongly in recent work, but books like Ibrahim al-Koni's The Bleeding of the Stone offer a very different view of the Arab world

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar's novel reflects the brutality of Gaddafi's Libya through the eyes of a young boy. In Tripoli in the summer of 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman struggles to make sense of his father's disappearance and of the terror it induces in the adults around him. In this country of torturers and their victims, boys must be men.

It is not just torture and kidnapping that Suleiman has to deal with. Why is his mother becoming increasingly dependent on the illicit "medicine" supplied by the baker; why is she burning the books his father loves; why is the man in the car outside his house always asking him for the names of his father's friends; and why is his best friend's father on television begging for his life before being hanged? These concerns have the boy permanently on edge, in a state of "quiet panic, as if at any moment the rug could be pulled from beneath my feet".

Matar distills his own experiences into this emotionally wrenching novel of love, repression and betrayal. His father disappeared into Gaddafi's jails in 1990, and his whereabouts remain unknown.

In the Country of Men, Matar's debut novel, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.

The Bleeding of the Stone by Ibrahim al-Koni

Koni's magical realism mixes reality, fantasy and mysticism to relate this ecological fable, set in the desert of southern Libya.

Asouf, a vegetarian Bedouin goatherd who lives alone in the desert, reveres the delicate balance between man and nature in that harsh environment. He holds the key to some of the desert's secrets, being custodian of the ancient paintings on the walls of the wadi and the only person who knows the whereabouts of the legendary waddan, a wild mountain sheep famed for its meat.

He shuns contact with his fellow man, interacting only with the occasional caravan. But both he and the waddan, which he holds to be sacred, come under threat with the arrival of two hunters who have a craving for meat. The men have already slaughtered the herds of gazelle that roamed the desert and now have their hearts set on eating waddan meat. They demand that Asouf reveal the sheep's hiding place.

Tradition and greed clash head on in a tale replete with aphorisms and poetic turns of phrase in a very different view of the Arab world to which we are accustomed.

Koni is a Libyan Tuareg writer whose work is deeply rooted in his desert origins.

Sandstorm by Lindsey Hilsum

In this superb account of Gaddafi's downfall, Hilsum reports first-hand on the 2011 uprising, but sets it against longer history. We follow the colonel from young, charismatic army officer and revolutionary to bizarre, Botoxed, delusional dictator.

In the west, the Arab world's longest-ruling strongman – in power for 42 years – is seen as a vile, narcissistic buffoon; a top arms supplier to terrorist and rebel groups worldwide; and architect of the Lockerbie bombing. In Libya, Gaddafi cows the population, silencing dissent with "disappearances", torture and public hangings; disseminates his weird and wacky ideas through the ubiquitous Green Book; and allows his family to plunder state assets (mostly the billions of dollars earned from oil sales).

The west flip-flops over relations – he is sometimes pariah, sometimes friend – but finally uses Nato planes to help topple him.

A massacre in 1996 at Tripoli's Abu Salim jail – when an estimated 1,270 political prisoners are gunned down – sows the seeds of Gaddafi's eventual fall. It's a wound that never heals for the families of the murdered men, and their protests spark the rebellion in Benghazi that leads to the Brother Leader's bloody end.

Hilsum, international editor for Channel 4 News, has written a perceptive, passionate and very readable book.

LibyaMiddle East and North AfricaAfricaPushpinder Khaneka
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Super Thursday: are you fed up with celebrity autobiographies?

Jennifer Saunders, John Bishop and other big names bring customers to bookshops, but Foyles' Jonathan Ruppin says there are problems with celebrity bookselling

The publishing industry returns for second helpings at the Christmas banquet today, as this year's second Super Thursday (the first was at the end of September) is stuffed full with celebrity offerings. Out today are autobiographies from David Jason, Jennifer Saunders and John Bishop, Patsy Kensit, Danny Baker and Ronnie O'Sullivan, June Brown and Brendan O'Carroll – all set to jostle for space in festive bookshop displays with new cookery titles from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Lorraine Pascale and Gok Wan. And that's not to mention the return of Bridget Jones and the first in a series about the Wars of the Roses from Conn Iggulden.

This annual short-cut to the news pages is as welcome to the book trade as a controversial literary award; it will boost sales for the big names and bring customers into bookshops, where we can present them with thousands of unexpected discoveries.

But with television supercharging many Super Thursday releases, this jamboree of celebrity bookselling contributes to the perception that publishing is almost entirely driven by the pursuit of big personalities.

Newsworthiness is too often determined by the writer's back story, rather than by the book itself, and this isn't confined to the celebrity sector. When Stef Penney won the 2006 Costa Book of the Year for her thriller, The Tenderness of Wolves, much of the coverage was devoted to marvelling that an agoraphobic could write a book mostly set outdoors – forgetting that an imagination is very much part of the job description for a novelist.

The high-profile titles out on Super Thursday are also usually the ones the most heavily discounted. I've come across non-fiction hardbacks at £25 to £30 that I thought were overpriced, but £9.99 probably isn't reasonable, either – especially when bookstores sell them at a loss to get your custom. When all bestsellers – and these are now largely determined by retailers who are not principally booksellers – are sold at untenably low prices, it skews perceptions of what is a reasonable price to pay across the board.

Super Thursday isn't the book industry in microcosm, but it does reflect a dichotomy at play. In an ideal world, people involved in the creation and promulgation of art wouldn't be distracted by the need to make a living. The fact that we must do so has come to mask the fundamental reason why just about everyone in the book business, from writer to bookseller, has chosen to work in it: because we love books.

Bookselling is about more than just staffing the tills. Most readers are more curious, more intelligent and more willing to try something different than many in the industry think; and the online world lets readers communicate with us better than ever before. It's the books we read, the books we talk about, the books we actually pick up off the shelf and buy that shape the future for booksellers, publishers and writers alike.

Jonathan Ruppin is web editor for Foyles.

PublishingBooksellersJonathan Ruppin
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Mark Forsyth's top 10 lost words

From snollygoster to wamblecropt, these forgotten words just might come handy, says the author of The Horologicon

Everybody has, on occasion, looked up a word in a dictionary and let their eye wander to the next word and thought: "Really? There's a word for that?", whether it's the little plastic aglets on the end of your shoelaces or the nurdle of toothpaste squeezed onto your toothbrush in the morning. I have simply had that feeling more than most.

In the end, I collected all the useful but forgotten, and obscure but necessary words I found in dusty, old dictionaries, and arranged them by the hour of the day when they might come in handy for my book about lost words, The Horologicon. Here are 10 of my favourites.

1. Wamblecropt

Wamblecropt means overcome with indigestion. Once upon a time, you might observe that your stomach was wambling a bit. If the wambles got so bad you couldn't move, you were wamblecropt. It's the most beautiful word in the English language to say aloud. Try it.

2. Sprunt

Sprunt is an old Scots word (from Roxburgh, to be precise) meaning "to chase girls around among the haystacks after dark". I would dearly love to have lived in a time and a place where this was such an everyday activity that they needed a single-syllable word for it. Old dialect words give us a glimpse of lost worlds, and sprunt is my favourite glimpse.

3. Groke

Another old Scots word, to groke is to gaze at somebody while they're eating in the hope that they'll give you some of their food. The word was originally used to refer to dogs – and any dog owner whose canine friend has salivated beside them while they eat a steak will know why – but it can also be used to describe that colleague who sidles up to you from across the office when you open a box of chocolates.

4. Uhtceare

Uhtceare is an Old English word that refers to anxiety experienced just before dawn. It describes that moment when you wake up too early and can't get back to sleep, no matter how tired you are, because you're worried about the day to come.

5. Snollygoster

Snollygoster is a 19th century American word for "a dishonest or corrupt politician". Or, to take an original definition from the editor of a Georgia newspaper: "a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy". The only reason I can imagine such a delicious word would die out is that all politicians are now honest.

6. Ultracrepidarian

Ultracrepidarianism is when you give your opinion on a topic about which you know nothing. What makes this word so useful is that nobody knows what it means. Tell someone they are ultracrepidarian and they'll probably consider it a compliment.

7. Gongoozle

I found gongoozle deep in the Oxford English Dictionary while I was researching The Horologicon. To gongoozle is to stare idly at a canal or watercourse. At the time, I thought it a weirdly precise and unnecessary word, but since then I've noticed gongoozlers everywhere. Walk along a riverbank or seafront on a sunny afternoon and you'll see lots of people happily gongoozling. I realised that I'd been gongoozling for years; I'd just never known the word.

8. Snudge

To snudge is to stride around as though you're terribly busy, when in fact you are doing nothing. It's particularly useful for the modern office, especially with the invention of the smartphone. You can snudge around all day without anyone realising you're checking up on the score in the Ashes.

9. Feague

Feague is a term from around the 18th century that means to put a live eel up a horse's bottom. Apparently, this was a horse dealer's trick to make an old horse seem more lively, which I suppose it would. But it does imply that you should never trust an 18th century horse dealer – especially if you're a horse, or an eel. I hope you find no use for this word. In 2012, a chap who walked into Auckland City Hospital, in New Zealand, could have saved himself a lot of embarrassment if he had simply announced: "I need to be de-feagued".

10. Sir Richard has taken off his considering cap

Benjamin Franklin, when he wasn't inventing bifocals and supporting the American Revolution, collected slang terms for being drunk. This is my favourite one, especially after a hard day's work. It sums up the feeling of work being over and drinking having begun.

Reference and languagesLanguage
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October's Reading group: Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe

With Halloween beckoning, what better way to spend the month than delving into the dark arts of the American author?

As the film shows, the hat has pulled out Edgar Allan Poe – "the ultimate doomed romantic: a crazed, drug-soaked proto-goth with a baleful raven perched on his shoulder, whose devotees include such varied figures as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Baudelaire, Josef Stalin, Rachmaninov, Michael Jackson, Tracy Emin and Bart Simpson", as Andrew Taylor wrote in a blog on his bicentenary.

That strikes me as a pretty damn solid choice for a Halloween themed reading group. Although, the piece of paper I read actually said: "Anything by Poe", leaving me in the awkward position of having to make a decision.

Fortunately, a quick click on the Guardian bookshop tells me there's a good cheap Poe edition from Penguin called Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Stories, so why don't we just start with that? And why not start with Murders in the Rue Morgue, since that's the title story of the collection. After that, we'll decide where to go next. We can talk about the stories as a whole, about detective fiction as a genre, about horror as a genre and, of course, about Poe himself, a man whose own life often seems as terror-filled and horrible as the descriptions in his stories.

As usual, I'm also open to all other suggestions for themes and points of discussion – and for ideas for approaching this unique and interesting writer. And indeed, whether we should let the fact that his biography is so dark shade our approach to his stories …

We have 10 copies of Murders in the Rue Morgue to give away to the first 10 people to post "I want a copy please", alongside a nice comment relevant to the book. And if you're lucky enough to get in early, don't forget to email Ginny.Hooker@guardian.co.uk as we can't track you down ourselves. Be nice to her too.

Edgar Allan PoeShort storiesHorrorClassicsFictionSam Jordison
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Russian court bans Qur'an translation

Edition of the holy book joins 2,000 publications banned over the last decade, as city of Novorossiysk blacklists an "extremist" Russian version. It isn't unusual to see extremism laws used against minority groups, but how far will Russia go?

While Geert Wilders and assorted online provocateurs may like to talk about banning the Qur'an as an extremist text, few take the idea seriously. Except in Russia, perhaps, where on 20 September, a court in the Russian city of Novorossiysk banned a translation of the holy book of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims.

To be fair, it is one of several available in the country. This version, the work of an Azeri theologian named Elmir Kuliyev, was declared illegal for promoting extremism through "statements about the superiority of Muslims over non-Muslims"; "negative evaluation of persons who have nothing to do with the Muslim religion"; "positive evaluation of hostile actions by Muslims against non-Muslims", and also, it was argued, inciting violence.

Unsurprisingly, the ruling – which automatically places Kuliyev's Qur'an on a nationwide blacklist – outraged many Russian Muslims. Russia's influential Council of Muftis denounced the verdict, and Kuliyev has one month to appeal. The ban is baffling, as the Russian authorities have little to gain by antagonising 15% of the population, including huge chunks of the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, never mind the restive republics of the Caucasus. Could it just be a case of an incompetent court gone rogue? Perhaps, but another major Muslim organisation has endorsed the verdict. Geraldine Fagan, an expert on religion in Russia, reports that "a representative of the All-Russian Muftiate – a rival to the Council of Muftis – defended the ruling against Kuliyev's translation of the Qur'an … From a theological point of view, Farid Salman maintained, Kuliyev's works 'correspond with the views of the "Salafi" school, not with [the] Islam that is traditional for Muslims of Russia'."

Could it be – as Fagan suggests – that "long-standing rivalries between Russian Muslim organisations may lie beneath state moves against Kuliyev's work"?

Maybe; however, Kuliyev's Qur'an is only one of over 2,000 publications Russian courts have added to the ministry of justice's blacklist since the law On Counteracting Extremist Activity was passed in 2002. All works by Nazis and Fascists are banned, while a cursory inspection reveals that many ultranationalist, antisemitic and jihadist texts have also been proscribed. Mussolini's tedious autobiography has actually been "doubled-banned" – although it was already illegal under the 2002 law, recently a publishing house named Algoritm published it anyway, and so a Krasnoyarsk court declared it extremist again. Works by Goebbels and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg have received similar treatment.

No doubt a lot of the forbidden books are extreme, although whether banning them makes any difference is another matter – after all, the Tsarist censor prohibited Lenin's writings, and look how that ended. Meanwhile, critics of the law object that many publications have been unfairly blacklisted.

For instance, Scientologists were upset when in 2012 a Moscow court banned the works of L Ron Hubbard for inciting extremism, on the grounds that the author of Battlefield Earth sought "to form an isolated social group whose members are trained to perform their functions generally aimed against the rest of the world". In this instance Russian attitudes are very close to those in France and Germany, where the governments also view Scientology with suspicion.

Other bans are more controversial. As if in a warm-up exercise for the Qur'an ban, last year a Russian court prohibited over 60 Islamic books, including classic hadith collections, while Jehovah's Witness texts – not normally identified with extremism – have also been blacklisted. In February this year a Kaliningrad court banned works by the Turkish theologian Said Nursi, who is apparently considered so dangerous that 13 people have received criminal sentences for possession of his writings, according to Geraldine Fagan.

Even the texts of minorities who are practically nonexistent in Russia risk proscription – last year, the Bhagavad Ghita narrowly escaped the blacklist, even though this Hindu text had originally been translated into Russian in 1788 and has been published numerous times since.

And yet even as the blacklist swells, one category of extremist publication is strikingly absent: books by and about the mass-murderer Joseph Stalin. So popular are these books that Eksmo, Russia's largest publisher, once ran two series – Stalinist and Stalin Renaissance – to satisfy demand. A cursory glance at Eksmo's catalogue reveals that there are still numerous decidedly pro-Stalin books still on their list, including Stalin: 20th Century Manager, whose author denounces the "propaganda" of perestroika-era critics, Stalin Before the Court of Pygmies and Marshal Stalin: Creator of a Great Victory. And why isn't Lenin's Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents banned? In this pamphlet, the great revolutionary advocates storing up acid to pour on the police, as well as inciting other forms of violence against the enemies of the proletariat.

Of course the absence of Lenin or Stalin from the blacklist is easily explained: there are still many people in Russia who endorse their rule – according to a 2012 survey, 42% of Russians polled named Stalin as one of the country's most prominent historical figures. Any judge who felt inclined to ban their works would face immense public opposition.

It is neither strange nor surprising, then, that vaguely worded laws against extremism should be inconsistently applied, or targeted at minority groups too weak to fight back. Russia is hardly the only country guilty of this, and the idea that people should be allowed to read and decide for themselves what is extreme is increasingly unpopular worldwide. Nevertheless, Russia does seem to have gone farther than most non-theocracies in empowering state functionaries to freely lob all sorts of texts on a blacklist. Soon, thanks to the vaguely defined "anti-gay propaganda" law and another vague law that prohibits offending religious feelings, even more publications will surely be banned.

The Qur'an case is interesting however, because it is so offensive to a large and long-established minority that is hardly voiceless in the country. I'd wager that it will be overturned as Vladimir Putin values stability highly. Then again, Russia can always surprise you. As for the Scientologists, well – sorry guys, you're just out of luck.

RussiaReligionCensorshipIslamDaniel Kalder
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Reading literary fiction improves empathy, study finds

New research shows works by writers such as Charles Dickens and Téa Obreht sharpen our ability to understand others' emotions – more than thrillers or romance novels

Have you ever felt that reading a good book makes you better able to connect with your fellow human beings? If so, the results of a new scientific study back you up, but only if your reading material is literary fiction – pulp fiction or non-fiction will not do.

Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York, have proved that reading literary fiction enhances the ability to detect and understand other people's emotions, a crucial skill in navigating complex social relationships.

In a series of five experiments, 1,000 participants were randomly assigned texts to read, either extracts of popular fiction such as bestseller Danielle Steel's The Sins of the Mother and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or more literary texts, such as Orange-winner The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht, Don DeLillo's "The Runner", from his collection The Angel Esmeralda, or work by Anton Chekhov.

The pair then used a variety of Theory of Mind techniques to measure how accurately the participants could identify emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.

"What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others," said Kidd.

Kidd and Castano, who have published their paper in Science, make a similar distinction between "writerly" writing and "readerly" writing to that made by Roland Barthes in his book on literary theory, The Pleasure of the Text. Mindful of the difficulties of determining what is literary fiction and what is not, certain of the literary extracts were chosen from the PEN/O Henry prize 2012 winners' anthology and the US National book awards finalists.

"Some writing is what you call 'writerly', you fill in the gaps and participate, and some is 'readerly', and you're entertained. We tend to see 'readerly' more in genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers, where the author dictates your experience as a reader. Literary [writerly] fiction lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way," Kidd said.

Transferring the experience of reading fiction into real-world situations was a natural leap, Kidd argued, because "the same psychological processes are used to navigate fiction and real relationships. Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience, it is a social experience."

Not all psychologists agreed with Kidd and Castano's use of Theory of Mind techniques. Philip Davies, a professor of psychological sciences at Liverpool University, whose work with the Reader Organisation connects prisoners with literature, said they were "a bit odd".

"Testing people's ability to read faces is a bit odd. The thing about novels is that they give you a view of an inner world that's not on show. Often what you learn from novels is to be a bit baffled … a novel tells you not to judge," Davies said.

"In Great Expectations, Pip is embarrassed by Joe, because he's crude and Pip is on the way up. Reading it, you ask yourself, what is it like to be Pip and what's it like to be Joe? Would I behave better than Pip in his situation? It's the spaces which emerge between the two characters where empathy occurs."

The five experiments used a combination of four different Theory of Mind tests: reading the mind in the eyes (RMET), the diagnostic analysis of non-verbal accuracy test (DANV), the positive affect negative affect scale (PANAS) and the Yoni test.

However, although Castano and Kidd proved that literary fiction improves social empathy, at least by some measures, they were not prepared to nail their colours to the mast when it came to using the results to determine whether a piece of writing is worthy of being called literary.

"These are aesthetic and stylistic concerns which as psychologists we can't and don't want to make judgments about," said Kidd. "Neither do we argue that people should only read literary fiction; it's just that only literary fiction seems to improve Theory of Mind in the short-term. There are likely benefits of reading popular fiction – certainly entertainment. We just did not measure them."

FictionTéa ObrehtCharles DickensDon DeLilloAnton ChekhovLiz Bury
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Open thread: Who should re-write Jane Austen?

Mansfield Park and Persuasion remain up for grabs in a project to rework Austen for contemporary audiences

The Austen Project, with bestselling contemporary authors reworking "the divine Jane" for a modern audience, kicks off later this month with the publication of Joanna Trollope's new Sense & Sensibility, in which Elinor is a sensible architecture student and impulsive Marianne dreams of art school.

Also promised are versions from Val McDermid (Northanger Abbey), Curtis Sittenfeld (Pride & Prejudice) and – gadzooks – the prolific Alexander McCall Smith, most famous for his Botswanan private eye novels, who has been let loose on Emma (an experience he describes as "like being asked to eat a box of delicious chocolates").

Yet to be announced, however, are the lucky authors who'll be reinterpreting Austen's two remaining novels. Here on the books desk we fancy Kate Atkinson, – so good at evoking global undercurrents in spiky family sagas – for Mansfield Park, a novel about life as a poor relation, with the issue of slavery lurking in the background.

And for Persuasion, a brilliant study of missed opportunities and second chances, about the way being made for someone changes as time goes by, how about David Nicholls, whose One Day chronicles the will-they-won't-they relationship of mismatched couple Dexter and Emma from youth to middle age?

Who would be your choices to rewrite Austen?

Jane Austen
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Poem of the week: Nicolson Square by Ron Butlin

A slice of urban realism from Edinburgh's makar, who turns a skilfully drawn scene of abuse into a wider comment on city life

The author of this week's poem is Ron Butlin, currently Edinburgh's makar, or poet laureate. The poem, Nicolson Square, is included in an affectionate trawl of the city, The Magicians of Edinburgh, in which Butlin visits specific landmarks, places and characters, glancing wryly at Scottish politics. Magic and mystery are included in the tour, with the help of humorous prose-links and James Hutcheson's playful illustrations, but the author doesn't ignore the stark facts of urban deprivation. These bleaker poems are among my favourites, perhaps because they are not bound by their location. The events in Nicolson Square are immediately recognisable and resonant: they could occur in any major city. The challenge of such material to the poet is to resist overemphasising his or her necessary indignation, and to avoid any note of superiority.

Butlin's colloquial diction and terse, compressed sentence structure guarantee a man-in-the-street's angle of appraisal. The girl is described using a few bare details: "Hardly sixteen – bleached hair, bleached skin, fear". The "bleached skin" might signify a woman of colour with "whitened" skin, but such a sophisticated cosmetic process seems unlikely. The chemical pallor of the face comes from other causes – lack of food and sleep, and, of course, sheer fright. If the girl's features are lost in vague, dead paleness, the man's are more clearly defined. Violence has shaped them: the anger and cuts are "clenched" into his face, and his eyes, testifying to more vicious fist-work, have become "pressed-in bruises". There's no sermon from the speaker, but it's made clear that the man no less than the girl is a victim of brutalising circumstance.

The couple argue in the road, causing the traffic to "break" (a more energetic verb than the expected "brake") around them. It's not just theatre: both are desperately earnest. But they have an audience: the three homeless people, a "parliament" no less, who in turn are arguing about the couple, presumably without coming to blows. They seem to reach a consensus, in fact, as "they shout at her to grow up / can't she?" The indirect speech is effective, and contains a more-than-literal question. There's a host of reasons why the girl can't grow up. Yet a strangely affecting flicker of humanity touches these harsh words. The girl is at least seen by her audience as someone who could still make choices, who might, in fact, one day grow up.

The sharpest shock is retrospective. The speaker has walked past the scene, after adding his coin to "the parliamentary cup", after which "the street shuts like a book". The simile closes the case for a moment, emphasises perhaps that the speaker and the reader are really quite safe – in a poem. Then comes the shock: the book is marked "just at the point where he hits her / in the mouth". Shutting the book begins to seem connected to the literal act of shutting someone's mouth with a fist.

The poem could have ended here, but the fact that stories, however horrible, move on is important to its moral dimension. The grammar again is informal: "No girl, no man and no parliament – only you and I / and …" (the speaker adds, significantly) "everyone else". The ruthless city, constantly changing, swirling an apparently anonymous crowd in all directions, engulfs the participants. That the sun "abandons" the street is a figure intended to remind us not only of the obvious – that the well-heeled abandon the poor, or that individuals abandon each other – but that cities in their dimmer recesses abandon communities.

This is a realistic poem. It convincingly replays the small, hopeless starburst of violence and abuse. It reveals trace elements of community spirit in that little "Greek chorus" of homeless witnesses. And it expresses the collective dismissal of such scenes, even when they are noticed. The appetite for stories and the moral instinct are connected, and both underlie that favourite human question: "What happened next?" Impossible to answer, the question hangs over the poem like the accumulated shadows of strangers passing each other by in the 21st-century city's eternal present tense.

Nicolson Square

The girl's left hand keeps her coat shut, the other's
empty. She's standing in the middle of the street,
the traffic breaking to a stop around her.
Hardly sixteen - bleached hair, bleached skin, fear.

The man she's with – badly healing cuts and anger
clenched into a face, pressed-in bruises
where the eyes should be.
She's telling him she's sorry, and being sworn at.

Nearby, a parliament of two men and a woman sits arguing
upon the pavement; they shout at her to grow up,
can't she? A taxi horn blares.
She doesn't move.

I drop my 50p into the parliamentary cup, and walk past.
Behind me, the street shuts like a book, the place marked
just at the point where he hits her
in the mouth.

When I'm back this evening, the story will have moved on.
No girl, no man and no parliament – only you and I
and everyone else, and the street growing darker around us
as the sun abandons it.

PoetryEdinburghScotlandCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

City life meets nature studies in this week's roundup of reader reviews

FECarr is a little suspicious of book reviews. At least Joe Gould, one of Joseph Mitchell's "most intriguing subjects", is sceptical of book reviewing, evoking a machine where you "jerk down a couple of levers and a review drops out" – which is enough to make FECarr a little cautious in reviewing Joseph Mitchell's collection of journalism, Up in the Old Hotel. Apparently it's the kind of book which would cause a reviewing machine "serious problems".

Caught somewhere between old-fashioned storytelling and keen reportage, Mitchell's work is difficult to pigeonhole. His subjects are niche, his style is singular; it's not difficult to see why his work isn't widely known.

But there's much in this collection of Mitchell's New Yorker writings, featuring all his portraits of the city's eccentrics, which shows his relative obscurity is undeserved, FECarr continues. It's not his "masterful" character depiction, his "sensitive curiosity" or his "infectious" interest that makes this collection "exceptional", it's his writing.

Mitchell's prose is very clean and very neat; clarity always trumps artfulness. His sentences are usually short, and he frequently makes straightforward statements of fact: 'He wanders from Louisiana to California and back again about twice a year. He is approximately seventy years old.' Detail, of which there is much, tends to accumulate through several such statements. It's a nicely recognisable style, and enables Mitchell to represent things as precisely as possible, which suits his material well.

If "merit were more important than marketability," FECarr laments, "everyone would know about Mitchell".

Another writer with a fine eye for detail is Miles Salter, according to novamarie's review of Animals:

One of many things I admire in Miles Salter's work is his use of the unexpected and almost casual image such as 'a sound track retching from the suburbs' ('The Devil invents Rock and Roll') or the detail in 'Lot Remembers Sarah' when the man imagines himself clinging to the woman's 'bleached body' and kissing her 'frozen mouth' while his tongue accidentally dislodges 'a crumb of salt'.

Salter depicts the "cruelty and callousness of all creatures with the human species the worst of all", novamarie says, the contemporary world conjured up as a "mess of claw and feather and noise". There's savagery and exploitation, novamarie continues, but "perhaps worse … an undercurrent of indifference and detachment from emotion".

It's enough to make you a little wary of the "escape into nature" RedBirdFlies hymns in Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. But there's little of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" here:

The Summer Book is a novel that reads more like non-fiction, an invocation of the spirit of its author Tove Jansson, who like Grandmother and Sophia in her book, spent all her summers on the small family island off the coast of Finland, doing just the kind of things Sophia does until feeling the constraints of the older woman she became, experiencing a coming of age (at 77) when she would no longer have the strength or confidence to brace the unpredictable sea after the storm that destroyed her boat, she sensibly retired to the mainland for the rest of her days.

The pages turn "like days of summer" RedBirdFlies continues, but make sure you don't get too comfortable in the sun-dappled light.

Implicit within all that passes is the perplexity of death, that absence, confronted prematurely by a young girl and sensitively explained by her older companion.

The Summer Book is "not a volume to be rushed", RedBirdFlies concludes, "it is best savoured and enjoyed slowly".

Thanks for all this week's reviews – if I've mentioned you here, drop me an email at richard.lea@theguardian.com and I'll dig you something out from the book cupboard.

Richard Lea
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