“This Is Not the End My Friend", the first story from the upcoming (and totally awesome) science fiction collection "Darwin’s Bastards", has a surreal and unusual concept, for sure, but a particularly unusual one for its author, Adam Lewis Schroeder.

"Art That Creeps" is a coffee-table book that isn’t really coffee-table material. All 192 pages contain strange and disturbing images from artists the world over, who range in styles from art deco to pop surrealism to Northern European renaissance.

"He kicked down the door of the burning building and ran through the flames, out into a clearing. A vampire ran towards him, as expected, but Abe had his axe ready and he swung the blade hard, lodging it deeply into the demon's chest."

Just when you thought he had gibbered his way off the cultural map, Ozzy Osbourne, the one and only Prince of Darkness, resurfaces with an autobiography promising to tell his full story, with no expurgations. An intriguing conceit.

The conceit of What Is Stephen Harper Reading? by Yann Martel is that a large number of Canadians would “dearly love” to have the prime minister’s ear for a moment. Martel has issues with Harper and some of his politics and ideas, or lack thereof, and feels that he can somehow school the big man, give him a proper education.

Toronto the Good is a distant memory for those who have lived there long enough to remember immaculately clean streets and one of the lower crime rates per capita of any metropolis. Things have changed. As the city burgeons and explodes into the 21st century, rising on all fronts high into the sky and burning ever brightly, congestion, garbage, grit, the occasional dead body and other darknesses also undergo an almost proportionate intensification.

Ostensibly a series of narrative essays and aphorisms loosely themed on memory, the beauty of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s new collection Dust is not so much the conclusions he draws, or the emotional crescendos he invokes, as the exhilarating, ecstatic manner in which he weaves his digressive, playful, restless and gorgeous blocks of prose.

In the Foreword to the 2009 edition of his eerily prophetic and much discussed book, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, which was first published in 1998, John Gray reflects (though in some sense he should be gloating) on the recent financial meltdown. He spelled out the dire consequences of enforced free market capitalism when he first wrote the book and whatever the flaws of his argument, history has proven him correct.

What if T.S. Eliot and, say, Ezra Pound, two 20th century giants of American poetry and key figures of the Modernist movement, had co-written a novel, even if it predated their eventual appearance on the poetic pantheon (or especially if it did), and even if it proved to be more an aesthetic curiosity than a masterpiece of the form? No doubt a mountain of critical books and monographs and PhD dissertations would have been generated.

Comedian Paul Mooney's tag line throughout his new memoir, Black Is the New White, is "keeping it real." And to a great extent he manages to deliver an uncompromising, often funny, often sad, though at times vertiginous, look back at his 40 years in the comedy trade. It's a barbed and heartfelt reflection of the struggle for acceptance and self-determination in an almost pathologically racist society.