Richard Price's meaty and fabulously enjoyable police procedural, Lush Life (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is a book I have pressed on a lot of friends. The new Robert B. Parker, Rough Weather (Quercus, £16.99), is bliss, too, because it has Spenser, Hawk and the Gray Man in it. Short stories from Kurt Vonnegut (Armageddon in Retrospect, Cape, £16.99 ...

When I first read that Annie Proulx had been bemoaning the "pornish" mail sent to her by fans of the film of her story Brokeback Mountain (first published in 1999), I misread pornish as Polish. All those people in Krakow causing Proulx "constant irritation in my private life". But in fact pornish it was. "There are countless people out there ...