This is a formidably intelligent, scarily informative and weirdly tender book about the worms, microbes, mites, bloodsuckers, manipulators and organ-invaders that live on us and in us. You might not end up being able to muster the same pervy thrill from castrating parasites and mind-controlling fungi as Zimmer does, but you'll definitely wash your hands more often when you've finished this book. And you're highly unlikely to order your meat rare ever again once you've read the part about muscle cysts full of flukes... A book that stays with you for a long time, in other words. Just as a good book- or a good parasite- should.

Yes, it's been hyped relentlessly by every blogger between wherever you are and the other side of the planet. And yes, it's excellent. But shall we give all the Tortoise/Steve Reich silliness a rest? Comparisons like this make 'Mirrored' sound like something you're supposed to like out of cultural duty rather than a piece of work that hits you somewhere vital. I'm calling this Muppet post-rock, with a Prozacked-out Animal on drums, Floyd and Janice playing guitars from the depths of their worst/best ever K-hole, and the severed head of Kermit the frog spliced onto a malfunctioning Kaos Pad, spewing semi-nonsense Teletubby-talk about scissors and kitchens.

Visibly and wittily using thousands of text fragments from old women's magazines, 'Woman's World' affectionately evokes the source material's era while at the same time savaging it by creating its own deranged world full of bizarre similes and earnest dialogue about slimming foundation garments or the merits of particular brands of headache tablets. Unlike 90% of the fiction being published right now, whether supposedly literary or popular, this book works in every way: as a piece of cut-up, found art; as an absorbing, funny read; as a very British story full of perfectly observed character types that still exist today; and most of all as a sly satire on the damage fashion and lifestyle magazines do to the psyches and self-images of their own readers.

The repetitive tenacity and minimalism of Erik Satie's Furniture Music, the crispy Teutonic techno of Kompakt Records and hundreds of glitchy and painstakingly rendered, beautiful shards from some very uncool source material (one track momentarily reveals itself as a methodical disembowelment of Lionel Richie's MOR cheese-mountain 'Hello')... It all comes together to make an album that occasionally does come pretty close to sublime.

Del Toro's work is somewhat schizoid; neatly divided into low-key, creepy, intelligent magical realist stories in Spanish and his more obviously mortgage-paying American popcorn efforts like 'Hellboy'. 'The Devil's Backbone' is in the former category, and while less powerful and darkly beautiful than his recent 'Pan's Labyrinth' (also set during the Spanish Civil War) it deserves to be seen both as a companion to that film and as a work in its own right.The performances are just unrealistic enough to match the melodrama of the times and Grand Guignol plot. It's satisfyingly and appropriately sad, with a particularly lovely sense of colour, light and darkness. Most DVD commentaries are self-aggrandising moron festivals or punishingly trite and dull, so major bonus points are in order for an illuminating one from the director on this disc. It's like watching the film with a funny and erudite friend.

Kelly's meta-book goes from the beginning of recorded history up to the (near) present with Georges Perec, telling the funny, sad or strange stories of books we can never read because they've all been permanently lost in one way or another. Many of them perished on the bonfires of bigots, by accident or just succumbed to the passing of time, but to me the most striking (and most frequently repeated) story here is of writers themselves annihilating their own work. 'The Book of Lost Books' is full of writing started but never finished and fiction unable to compete with real-life sex, booze, drugs or horrifying venereal diseases; manuscripts fall victim to their authors' damaged confidence and rejection, or are just chucked onto the fire during the kind of hissy fits that anyone who knows a writer- or is one- will recognise. Kelly tells the stories of the authors and the stories of their stories with sly humour, an evident love for literature and a very touching regret for every potentially great book the world should have had but never will.

My story 'Ecosystem Discovered in Saatchi's Pocket' is in this Snowbooks anthology: The Edgier Waters- 5 Years of 3:AM. It collects the best fiction and other writing from the online literature magazine's last hemidecade. The other authors are too numerous to list fully, but there's some great writing in this book. Even if I wasn't in it, I'd recommend Kenji Siratori, Daren King, Steve Aylett and especially the sardonic Morrissey-idolating genius of H.P. Tinker. You can buy the book from Amazon, and I really think you deserve it.