‘Get me to the funny bar’
Her childhood was catastrophic, her husband left her for a man, and she has battled with alcohol, drugs and manic depression. But Carrie Fisher can't understand why celebrities are such whingers.
Damned out of his own mouth
Joe Eszterhas cements his reputation as the foulest man in Tinseltown in his lewd memoir, Hollywood Animal
Luminous moments
Peter Nichols revels in The Longshoreman, the memoirs of marine biologist Richard Shelton
Porn und Drang
The latest novel of Germany's hot young writer Thor Kunkel exposes the Nazis' previously unknown trade in pornographic films. Sounds like a guaranteed bestseller. So why has the book's publisher cancelled it and kicked up a literary storm? Luke Harding investigates.
End of the US empire
He foresaw the Soviet collapse. Now Emmanuel Todd says America is next. John Kampfner assesses an intriguing vision of the future, After the Empire
Carrie on popping
Carrie Fisher trawls her life of drugs, mayhem and booze again in The Best Awful
Jungle conundrum
Anyone looking for clues as to the state of mind of John Lydon should start with his autobiography, Rotten, says Sean O'Hagan
Hold your tongue
Half of the world's 6,000 languages are close to extinction. Mark Abley listens to the world's endangered languages in Spoken Here
Black in the USSR
Andrew Meier reveals the dark underbelly of a dying nation as he journeys around Russia in Black Earth
‘I’d never even heard of chick lit’
As the daughter of the Irish prime minister, she was always in the public eye. But now, with the US paying $1m for her first novel, Cecelia Ahern is a star in her own right. Angelique Chrisafis meets her.
A voice from death row
Scott Turow's analysis of capital punishment, Ultimate Punishment, is informed by honesty and humanity
Death of a continent
Ursula Owen charts the tragedy of the Aids epidemic in the latest edition of Index on Censorship, Apocalypse
Day-to-day life in a Barrett home
Iain Finlayson's exhaustive life reveals that the most interesting thing about Browning was his wife
The bunkum stops here
Fairies, crystals, abduction by aliens... some people will believe in everything. Francis Wheen strikes a blow for rationality in How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
Empire’s child: Andrea Levy on Small Island
Andrea Levy started writing to unravel her family’s story: her parents coming from Jamaica to the UK, their shock on arrival and her own experience growing up here. But in her new novel she’s confronting the politics of it all, she tells Bonnie Greer