We learn the unsatisfying tedium of enduring a string of too easily won sexual encounters several hundred pages before Strauss finally does, and it's hard to muster any sympathy "Don't hate the player.. hate the game," Strauss implores us. Even if their conquests on the LA party scene don't see it, the PUAs remain irredeemably geeky, and the book's most laugh-out-loud moments were probably unintentional. Within two years he's become a guru himself, had hundreds of women and set up a bachelor pad where he lives with several other PUA gurus and Courtney Love. A few seminars with the scene's leading gurus later and he's able to approach the Playmate of the Year and come away with her phone number. The even greater surprise is that these strategies apparently work. By his own account, until he began to investigate the world of the professional pick-up artist (PUA), Strauss was a skinny, nerdy journalist with a mere six notches on his bedpost.

The surprise revealed in Neil Strauss' eye-opening but immensely dispiriting memoir is that they've organised themselves into a huge online support network, swapping advice on how to approach women and systematically devising and perfecting strategies for getting them into bed. The Game by Neil Strauss (CANONGATE £8.99) It's no news that there are unhappy, lonely men who turn to the internet for help in coping with sexual frustration. Marina Warner contributes a personal, fascinating piece about Catholicism. And, recounting the week he spent as a homeless boho in Thatcher's Britain, Michel Faber provides (amid competition from Don Paterson's poetry) the book's most open-hearted, elegant and humane piece of writing. In the non-fiction category, where I think it's fair enough, the best pieces are by big-name writers.

Personally, I'll be more excited to read Malachite and Verdigris by Maura Dooley and Maik Nwosu's A Gecko's Farewell, both of which are shaping up to be vibrant, imaginative contemporary fairy tales. It's debatable whether the forthcoming novels by Esther Freud and Jane Rogers needed the exposure but, from the included extracts, it looks as though the former will be picturesque trip to Italy, and the latter perhaps a paranoid literary thriller featuring a romance between two scientists. But there are also stories with historical or socio-political sweep (C D Rose's The Neva Star, about Russian sailors), with formal experimentation (paulo de costa's Pirandello-like Turning the Page) or with a sly or surreal bent (Chris Womersley's grungy doppelganger narrative The Shed). There's no discernable thematic consistency, but the tendency is towards the domestic and intimate (the best of these, the compressed, near-wordless romance in Peter Kahn's Third Wife by James Lasdun). And finally, a sense of loss at the devaluation of spices in the first globalised economy.

NW14: The anthology of new writing Ed Lavinia Greenlaw & Helon Habila (GRANTA £9.99) The British Council's 14th annual collection brings together the customary array of new material: short stories, poetry, non- fiction and extracts from novels in progress, by writers unknown and established. Keay's history, then, begins with romance and wonder, before it gives way to the adventure and violence of the age of maritime exploration. Keay draws on writings from ancient Greece and Rome, the Chinese and the Muslim empires, to reveal the regard in which they've been held: their mysterious origins aligning them with the ambrosia of the Greek Gods. To talk in the singular of "the spice route" is, even more than with "the Silk Road", to use a misnomer.

Spices have been exchanged and prized since the ancient world. The developments in shipbuilding, navigational science and ballistics, with which Europe gained maritime supremacy, were all driven by spices. The primacy of these seasonings in the development of the modern world has been noted before, but in John Keay's telling, that flurry of often violent activity isn't the beginning but instead the rather sad ending of a story that stretches back thousands of years. The discovery by Europeans of the Americas, the Pacific and a sea route around Africa were all incidental to the search for these uncommonly precious bits of vegetable matter.