One of the pleasures of reading an essayist as eclectic as Geoff Dyer is that one can go within a few pages from regarding him as a fount of wisdom (when his opinions match yours) to thinking he's a pretentious phoney (when they don't).

For women of a certain (or uncertain) age, remembering nothing is not difficult. Remembering something is more problematic. Thus, women of a certain age will be enchanted by Nora Ephron's take on memory, or lack of it.

It's been six months since the last Joyce Carol Oates, so it's not surprising to find she has another book out. Her productivity is astonishing, she's Barbara Cartland in black instead of pink.

Confession time: I'd never read anything by Anne Rice before this. For a while, I thought she was another name for Stephenie Meyer. She's not (of course), but she could be.

I began this book when a William Lobb rose was in its first flowering in my garden. Every time I went out to get the mail the perfume hung in the air and I breathed it in and felt good about being alive.

David Larsen talks to career film buff David Thomson about his revised classic.

One of the many funny lines in the profanity-strewn satirical film In The Loop came from the character Jamie Macdonald, the senior press officer in 10 Downing St and the "angriest man in Scotland".

In a week when one billion Valentine's Day cards are sent worldwide, we might wonder where the tradition of the passionate avowal came from.

Having led a lonely childhood, Lesley Pearse knows what it is to seek a better life. Now she is helping women to help others. She tells Stephen Jewell how.

Here's a story about how to become middle-aged and middle-class - without noticing it.

Dan Shanan is a trustee of the Documentary Edge Festival.

Craig Cliff's first collection of stories heralds the arrival of an electrifying new voice on the New Zealand writing scene. These stories are standalone gems, but the collection also brings together satisfying harmonies as a whole.

John Irving is the king of the long, multilayered novel. In the tradition of Dickens, he cleverly weaves together the intricate threads of cross-generational storylines.

Kiwi crime queen Vanda Symon talks to Craig Sisterson about accidental heroines and playing with swords.

There's the boy who kills sheep and gouges out their eyes. There's the young man who wishes literally to eat his girlfriend but who angrily denies he is a Hannibal Lecter figure.

Paul Torday produces an intriguing page-turner that won't fail to surprise.