Pox Americana, by Elizabeth A Fenn (Sutton, £9.99)
History is normally written about wars rather than diseases, but as Fenn's fascinating book shows, a virus can alter the lives of far more people than a general. The great smallpox epidemic that ravaged North America between 1775 and 1782 killed, by the author's most conservative estimate, more than 130,000 people. In the same period the American war of independence cost 25,000 soldiers' lives.
"While the American revolution may have defined the era for history," she writes, "epidemic smallpox nevertheless defined it for many of the Americans who lived and died in that time." Constructing her story as a thriller, complete with journal extracts, colourful scene-setting and walk-on parts for celebrities such as George Washington, Fenn evokes tension and alarm in her description of the relentless spread of Variola virus. There is also cause for contemporary concern, as the disease, though eradicated in the wild decades ago, may yet return as a biological weapon. Steven Poole
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, by Gilles Deleuze (Continuum, £9.99)
The French reissue of this book was, so we are told in the delightful preface, published "in the collection L'Ordre philosophique, in which the function of every book is to create disorder".
Deleuze's merry study of the painter may well be argued to have fulfilled that function. Consisting of short themed chapters, it has provocative and interesting things to say not only about Bacon's work - "As a portraitist, Bacon is a painter of heads, not faces, and there is a great difference between the two" - but also that of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Samuel Beckett and Egyptian and Byzantine art. Sometimes he reaches too far with an analogy (the distinction between analogue and digital synthesisers is poorly understood), but better that than not reaching far enough. That there are no visual aids in this edition hardly seems to matter - they would perhaps only be a distraction from the hallucinatory intensity of Deleuze's whirling arguments. SP
Maximum Diner, by Christopher Nye (Sort Of Books, £6.99)
It's somewhat unusual for a book to make me want to go out and eat a big plate of corned beef hash, but Christopher Nye achieves this remarkable effect with the entertaining story of how he opened an American-style diner in a small town in East Sussex. From his initial location researches (sticking pins in a big map to make him feel manly), through haggling over a lease, getting the booths and tables fitted, writing the menus, hiring staff and eventually opening, only to have to deal on Friday nights with a gang of drunken violent yobs all called Gary, the narration is self-deprecating and funny.
A fine moment comes when, as Nye is constructing a huge papier-mché cheeseburger to put on his car, the owner of a neighbouring Chinese takeaway announces that it looks "like a giant dogshit". The late entry of evil giant McDonald's to the story will fuel more No Logo-style indignation among readers. SP
The Writing Notebooks, by Hélène Cixous, edited and translated by Susan Sellers (Continuum, £14.99)
Cixous fans will be happy at the photographic reproductions here of her notebooks, with printed parallel texts in French and English, wherein one can find fragments of criticism and theorising, and seeds for poems and novels. Different handwriting styles appear to represent different moods: big, round, unruly scrawls for stream-of-consciousness half-sentences; smaller and tighter for analytical plans.
Sometimes the writing is neatly paragraphed, sometimes it spurts everywhere, as though, Cixous says, "it were a volcano spitting lava". Occasionally a fine image bursts on to the page, and one can only concur with the author's anger at John Cowper Powys's murder of his cats for the crime of urinating on his white counterpane. Large sections of these notebooks will, however, be obscure to all but specialists. One tends to agreement when coming across the line: "I can't understand what this basket means at all." SP
The Golden Girls of MGM, by Jayne Wayne (Robson, £8.99)
This is so deliciously dire I couldn't leave it alone. Written in an upmarket version of Confidential magazine prose (slavering over adjectives such as torrid, beauteous and immaculate), it collages résumés of Ava, Judy and Grace etc condensed from shelves of biogs, together with synthesised dialogue and jolts of speculation.
Wayne is only marginally interested in what the gals did on screen - how Garland sang out loud the way we believe we sing in our head; how Garbo permanently defied classification by age or gender or fashion - the filmographies are mere lists of titles and dates. She's a dirt-chaser: her brief lives are 25 pages each (good girls get less) of prime sinn-uendo, from Lana Turner's first abortion to the contestations of Joan Crawford's will. The cumulative effect is peculiarly like Ovid's Metamorphoses; mortals are transformed into stars as a result of the lusts of the gods - with Louis B Mayer in the role of Zeus of the Olympia at Metro. Vera Rule
Print the Legend, by Martha Sandweiss (Yale, £20)
The tone of this study of photography and the US west is Larry McMurtry-like: Sandweiss damn near drawls her line about cowhands being "more likely to wear chaps for the photographer than for their horse", while her description of a theatre show of the Mexican war that took in the Garden of Eden, Noah's flood and a midnight mass in Rome is utterly unimpressed.
She's perceptive not only about the pix - from 1840s daguerrotypes of native Americans who knew exactly what they were doing staring piercingly into the lens, to 1890s book shots already sepia with nostalgia - but also about their leading role in the invention of the west. There's a brilliant chapter on cinema pre-history: a pantoscope presentation of California (the first motion picture - three miles of painted canvas, unspooled before your eyes) and its dependence on an accompanying uplifting patriotic narrative. A shot of Nebraskan homesteaders beside their harmonium under the skies is amazing. VR
