Welcome, readers all, to this week's reviews roundup. Now, writing about writing is one thing. But writing about writing about writing could get more confusing. Nevertheless it's a challenge NickVirk has masterfully embraced, this week, in his review of George Gissing's Victorian classic. New Grub Street, he tells us, "is a novel which aptly depicts the psychological frustrations of an author." Although the book is now often overlooked, "Gissing weaves his words together with aplomb and his characters are as remarkable as any that Dickens or Austen ever created," he says. And in spite of a "bitterly depressing plot'," it had him hooked: "The novel reads like a thriller and is an ample page-turner even for those who prefer contemporary fiction."

A very contemporary piece of fiction had Christopher Philip Howe less enamoured. On Sebastian Faulks's newly published A Possible Life, he writes that the 'decision to put what are, effectively, five novellas into one book makes them feel compressed and constrained.' One weakness of the book, he decides, is its failure to live up to its own possibilities. "By packaging these stories together with the title A Possible Life, Faulks promises something more profound than two strong and three weaker stories linked by only the most tenuous of threads." What emerges, he concludes, "is a collection that is not, really, much more than a sum of its parts."

Frank O'Connor's My Oedipus Complex: and Other Stories received a more effusive response. 'I love this collection like I love my mother,' writes OpinionsLtd, "It's complicated." What impressed OpinionsLtd was the "confessional quality" of O'Connor's style. "I couldn't help but listen," he explains. It might not have hit "lyrical notes", as he puts it. "Nor does it have a straightforward pithiness," but it's a style that "matured with his subjects...it felt like all the characters were growing up, growing old and driving towards death together. Finishing it felt like losing a family."

And that's it for this week. As ever, if your review appears here, mail us at claire.armitstead@theguardian.com and we'll send you some books. Have a lovely weekend!