There is something to offend everyone in the latest issue of Meanjin. Several contributors boldly tackle religious questions – always plenty of kindling for the fire there. Jeff Sparrow takes on the so-called ‘New Atheists’, in the process throwing a few Marxist haymakers at Bush, Rudd and ‘the Israeli apartheid state’. The ‘religious undergirding’ of secular thought is considered by the Sydney academic John Potts, who finds that greenies, old-style lefties and post-structuralists are much closer to Messianic Christianity than they might think (along the way, he is snide about vegetarians, too). Elsewhere, Paul Mitchell contrasts the spiritual impulses at work in contemporary Australian fiction, though some of his assumptions are bound to get nonbelievers offside.

The first book I ever properly owned – pored over, slept with, inscribed – was an elaborately illustrated hardback copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. One can imagine the producers of the attractively packaged Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children hoping it might assume similar significance for a contemporary seven-year-old boy. Conn Iggulden’s secret and quirky world of the Tollins involves old, greybearded men, intricate maps and plenty of adventures and derring-do by the book’s unlikely hero, Sparkler.

Under Stones, a collection of short stories and one poem by first-time author Bob Franklin, reads like a study in subterfuge: a teenage outcast wreaks cyber vengeance on her local Tidy Town group; a man’s online porn addiction is turned against him by a mysterious workmate; a seasoned duck hunter finds that the target has shifted without his knowledge. Yet scratch the surface and you will find that the deception runs deeper than that; the darkly humorous scenarios hint at society’s moral decay. In ‘Soldier On’, a man’s homecoming visit to England to see his retired parents turns from farcical to forlorn, as his infuriation over their addiction to soap operas gives way to a disquieting realisation about the widespread misery of the elderly.

Do not be put off by the earnest and fusty-sounding title. The Companion to Women’s Historical Writing is not a book to acquire for the reference shelf on the off chance of needing to look up some arcane topic in the future. Quite the contrary. I have found it to be a most enjoyable bedside companion. Arranged alphabetically, with more than one hundred and fifty entries, it offers thumbnail sketches for a quick dip and more substantial essays to hold the attention in a longer engagement. The three editors, like most of the other fifty or so contributors, are distinguished writers in their own fields. Mary Spongberg, at Macquarie University, is the editor of Australian Feminist Studies; Ann Curthoys, from Sydney University, is a doyenne of Australian cultural and political history; and at Monash, Barbara Caine is a leading scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history. Drawing on their own research fields, each has provided long and lively analytical pieces, as well as writing a great many of the shorter entries. With some six hundred pages, plus another hundred when the index and bibliography are included, the Companion is a good fat book that will not sell the reader short. The new paperback edition has presumably been issued as a consequence of the success in the last five years of the expensive hardback.

One of the things I am often called on to do as a bookseller is to make recommendations, particularly when it comes to fiction. This involves making a judgement about what a customer wants from a book, rather than what a book may want from its reader. Many readers declare from the outset that all they want from a novel is a good story they can escape into. They happily admit that they don’t want to be challenged, don’t want to work for their enjoyment.

This is the frequently offered rationale for mass-market fiction: pure escapism. It exists to entertain, not to edify. Hackneyed storylines and wooden dialogue don’t matter, so the argument goes; all that does matter is giving people the kind of uncomplicated enjoyment they crave. The writing might not be stylish, but neither is it pretentious. Fair enough, perhaps. If you are the kind of reader who sees nothing wrong with lines such as ‘a fresh spike of fear gripped him’ or ‘there was only one way to heal his thirst for revenge’ or ‘Iris has always been blindly attracted to people who don’t fit the mould’, then criticism of this book is probably redundant. If, however, mixed metaphors, clichés and melodramatic flourishes make you cringe, be warned that Fiona McIntosh’s Fields of Gold is full of them.

It is no secret that scholarly publishing is between a rock and a hard place these days. The rock is the proliferation of titles demanded by university research quanta and government assessment exercises. The hard place is the endless tightening of library acquisitions budgets. The result is ever-shrinking print runs, ever-growing covert or explicit publication subsidies and a rational but extreme conservatism in the commissioning habits of those academic presses that strive to remain quasi-commercial. Essay collections, in particular, have a hard time as book proposals, because, as publishers will tell you, people don’t buy them.

Cynthia Ozick’s most recent collection of criticism, The Din in the Head (2006), contains a brief but engaging essay called ‘Highbrow Blues’. It begins with her musing about a gaffe made by Jonathan Franzen following the publication of The Corrections (2002). Oprah Winfrey had selected Franzen’s novel for her televised book club, which was popular enough to turn any work she chose into a bestseller, but Franzen was uncomfortable with her program’s folksiness. He felt that the club’s reputation for featuring works of middlebrow fiction did not fit with his literary ambitions and that an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show was not likely to enhance his credibility. ‘I feel,’ he explained, ‘like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition.’ Brickbats flew from all directions. But why, wonders Ozick, did Franzen’s remark seem so jejune?