This month’s best paperbacks: Leonard Cohen, Sigrid Nunez and more

The Vulnerables Sigrid Nunez Animal magic in Manhattan Sigrid Nunez's ninth novel, The Vulnerables, emerges from the words of others. The first line comes not from the narrator herself, but from another work she now barely recalls. From there it's a deluge. In barely a couple of pages she quotes Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In a single paragraph, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop. Nunez has long been an allusive writer, attuned to the literature that shapes her outlook. Her narrators – Nunez standins – frequently suspend their train of thought, seeking guidance from the writers they admire. The effect is ruminative, charming, a touch eccentric. Here, though, a note of anxiety hums beneath the bookish surface. Many of the quotes address the problem of how to begin, drawing attention to the lack of establishing detail. Is a subject being sought, or nervously held at bay? As the focus tightens, we see what the narrator has been circling: the Covid-19 pandemic. This arrival into our recent collective trauma reshapes the preceding material. That blizzard of quotes and allusions was a coping mechanism: a search for meaning in the already-named; an appeal to a state of attention now ruptured. In Nunez's 2018 National Book award winner, The Friend, an adopted dog offered comfort and a connection to the deceased. In The Vulnerables, a parrot provides a vital connection to life. A well-heeled acquaintance is stranded abroad; their housesitter has fled. The narrator visits daily, tending to the bird in his bespoke Manhattan pad. Soon, she moves in full-time. "An entire luxury boutique building and a full staff," she notes, "all for one little old bird and me." It's a low-stakes, high-privilege setup. No acute wards here, no intubated patients or bodies stacked in the street. The pandemic is an atmosphere, not an event. Are we really to care, against the backdrop of global plague, about a writer in a penthouse with a parrot? Such is Nunez's great talent: she can make us care about anything. Do the things we know truly serve us? Is the literature we love of any use when the world we inhabit capsizes? Nunez's doubt feels necessary and valuable. How remarkable, then, that her work, and all the doubt it contains, still reassures us, and leaves us, as the novel reaches its extraordinarily hopeful and disarming last line, with the feeling that we have been helped.

£8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Nightwatching Tracy Sierra A monster in the house A woman wakes up in the middle of the night. "There was someone in the house." She's imagining it, she tells herself. But then she sees him – a man, tall, with "the distantly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she'd tasted before and couldn't quite place". As he moves through her dark home, she realises she has seconds to decide what to do: pretend to be asleep, run, or wake her children and hide them away. "'We have to be quiet,' she whispered. 'We have to be quiet! If we're not quiet the monster will get us!'" Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra plays on old fears and nightmares to create one of the most terrifying – and brilliant – thrillers I have ever read. It had me waking at night after swirling bad dreams, and I keep going back to it in my mind, picking over the scenarios in which Sierra places her brave, capable protagonist. Gripping from start to finish, with an antagonist to leave you trembling in your bedroom at night, it's hard to believe this is a first novel, and I can't recommend it more highly.

£8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop A Ballet of Lepers Leonard Cohen Violent literary beginnings Long before he wrote Famous Blue Raincoat or Last Year's Man, Leonard Cohen already knew – with painful exactness – who he wanted to be. In a short story dating from 1957, collected here for the first time, he details his 13-year-old self's "heroic vision" of a charismatic future persona: "I was a man in the middle-twenties, raincoated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of countless audiences." Swap in "mid-70s", take off the raincoat to reveal the natty suit beneath, transport the life-bruised man from wet boulevard to centre stage, and behold the Cohen I saw perform in 2008, everything the 13-year-old Leonard might have wished for. A Ballet of Lepers is Cohen's rediscovered first novel (at 112 pages, it's more a novella), accompanied by 16 short stories. Ranging from an unvarnished journal entry to an intergalactic Twilight Zone episode, they come across as an endearingly ragtag bunch of tryouts. For the Cohen obsessive, there are fascinating glimpses into his self-fashioning. There are characteristic one-liners: "One thing is sure: I know how to relax in a bathtub." And almost all the stories feature a Cohen alter ego having romantic trouble. At its worst, A Ballet of Lepers is bitter and portentous. The desired persona speaks louder than the actual man. "It happened, that is all, it happened just as Buchenwald happened, and Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, and it will happen again ... we will say that it is the plan of a madman ... but the madman is ourselves, the violent plans ... they are all our own and we are not mad, we are crying for purity and love." This is the narrator's existential justification of the previous scene, in which, while breaking off his engagement to his lover Marylin, he beats her. In order to become the truly heroic man I saw in 2008, Cohen had first of all to win the love of those countless audiences, and then overcome his need for it. Here are his first, fascinating struggles to repulse and to endear.

£9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop What Writers Read Edited by Pandora Sykes Authors' favourite books According to journalist and podcaster Pandora Sykes "knowing an author's favourite book feels like a delicious piece of insider information". Published in aid of the National Literacy Trust – at a time when 800 libraries have closed in the last decade – 35 authors have written brief love letters to the book that transformed them as a writer and as a person. As Nick Hornby says, "there are some books that you know are there, at the core of you". For him it is Erich Kästner's children's classic Emil and the Detectives, whose mix of humour and sadness offered "comfort, distraction and companionship" to him when he was struggling as a boy. Marian Keyes also read her favourite book at a low point in her life, finding Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons to be "subversive and unexpected, elegant and cold". Sometimes it seems that a book comes along at just the right moment and connects with a reader, creating a strange alchemy between two minds through the power of the printed word. For Diana Evans – whose choice is Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides – "the miracle of writing is that we can meet other people on the page...This is why books to me are like friends." Elif Shafak read Virginia Woolf's Orlando aged 18. For her it remains "a courageous book, full of chutzpah". The novel challenged gender norms and, being bisexual, Shafak immediately recognized "a kindred spirit" in Woolf. Nikesh Shukla identified with Spider-Man when he was young, reading the comics "obsessively" and connecting with the character in a "spiritual" way: "I was Peter Parker. He was me." In those stories he found a safe place "where quiet nerds like me could make a difference". As Ali Smith says about Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, writing that moves the reader exerts "a kind of magic" that endures for the whole of their lives. At a time when 413,000 young people in the UK don't own a book, this is a timely and important collection of essays on the vital role reading plays in challenging and inspiring us all.

£8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop A Bird in Winter Louise Doughty Effortless entertainment Louise Doughty has done it again. A Bird in Winter is her 10th novel and it follows a string of addictive thrillers (including the bestsellers Platform Seven, Apple Tree Yard and Whatever You Love) in which she writes about a modern woman on the edge. Here, an office worker walks out on her life, abandoning her job and family. But is this a fanciful midlife adventure, or is she fleeing something? For the protagonist, Bird, flight comes first with desperate urgency, then with paranoia, which it turns out is justified: she is indeed being hunted. There's a touch of reality TV about it all – a combination of Hunted and Alone, perhaps, in which people have to survive in terrifying places such as "the north" and "the countryside". A Bird in Winter explores the horror of being followed, but it also taps into universal fantasies of what it would be like to drop everything and go on the run, taking on different personae and relying on survival skills gleaned from scouts' manuals and spymasters' training. While Bird's primary sensation might be dread, for the reader the story is great fun.

£8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Be Useful Arnold Schwarzenegger Self-help tips that are more gain than pain Arnold Schwarzenegger wants you to know that you're a lazy piece of shit. But he's going to tell you politely; with care and a few encouraging suggestions. He's going to be good-natured and nonjudgmental about it. Or a bit judgmental about it. But only because he doesn't want you to be a lazy piece of shit any more. Instead, he wants you to be useful. If that titular phrase sounds like something a parent tells their kid when said kid is hovering about after school, that's because it's exactly what Schwarzenegger's disciplinarian policeman father used to tell him. Schwarzenegger, 76, is now in the "fourth act" of his life. He's been the world's most famous bodybuilder, a Hollywood movie star, a surprise (mostly hit) governor of California and now an author and quasi-motivational speaker – the catalyst for which was the viral videos he posted during the US pandemic lockdown. Schwarzenegger, far from the cyborg killing machine of his catchphrase film role, is an amiable instructor. A lot of the basic stuff here works. His idea to beget ideas is walking, which, as he points out, is not an original one (he must have thought of it while standing still); he's just seconding Nietzsche and Aristotle. He recommends incremental changes at first, which is what most primary care doctors might suggest. Lots of advice is similar to that found in 1980s and 90s classics of the self-help genre that either attempted to compensate for the booming rat-race class or else leaned into it. He talks about surrounding yourself with supportive people. All this is good, sound practice. There are the usual Nelson Mandela and Dalai Lama citations. There is, mercilessly, nothing wacky. There's always a concern with books such as these: will they acknowledge the discriminatory nature of social hierarchical structures and institutions, economic circumstances, health issues and various other impediments to fulfilling potential? Schwarzenegger nods towards them, but more so takes the line that if he, a kid who grew up in a house with no running water, can make it, then anyone can. People will have their views on that, although he's transparent that one person's version of fulfilment (pushing through groundbreaking environmental legislation) might differ from another's (wholesome family; a good job that pays the bills). The triumph of this book is that it's quite rare in the self-help canon – or what publishers now term personal development – to not make a cynic such as myself roll their eyes, and this one doesn't. It's a shame that whoever was responsible for the jacket blurbs takes a shoving-a-finger-in-your chest approach that isn't replicated by the variable tone inside, which is sometimes dogmatic but often reflects the genuine kindness and enthusiasm of its author. Be Useful, it turns out, is very helpful.

£9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop What's Cooking in the Kremlin Witold Szabłowski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Building a country's power with a knife and fork According to the Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski, Russia has "built its power with a knife and fork – and famine". To write this book he travelled through Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other former Soviet republics tracking down the chefs who cooked for the regime's leaders. Szabłowski finished his research before the war in Ukraine and, although he was once questioned by the security services, he was only able to complete it because "it never occurred to any of Putin's state agencies that it's possible to show the mechanisms of power through the kitchen". The idea for the book came to him a decade ago, while visiting Stalin's summer dacha in New Athos, Abkhazia, once the Soviet Côte d'Azur. In eighteen chapters he tells the culinary history of the regime and its chefs. He begins with Ivan Kharitonov who cooked for the last tsar, Nicholas II. His great-granddaughter tells his story over a meal of vodka and a paté made from a recipe "straight from the tsar's kitchen". Kharitonov was one of four loyal staff who stayed with the Romanovs to the end and was shot with them. Apparently, the tsar's favourite meal was turtle doves with pasta. Szabłowski even includes a recipe – although as turtle doves are now protected, he suggests pigeon or quail as a substitute. Two chapters focus on Sasha Egnatashvili, a Georgian restaurateur whose father had employed Stalin's mother in his own restaurant. Egnatashvili became "the Kremlin's expert at achieving the impossible" as regards cooking and Stalin placed him in charge of catering for the Yalta conference. At a time when the Soviet Union and Europe was ravaged by war, he had to feed hundreds of dignitaries. His menu included red and black caviar as well as Crimean champagne, and he even found a large Soviet turkey to present to President Roosevelt. Stalin was delighted, rewarding Egnatashvili with a medal and a large bonus. Especially fascinating is the chapter on "the Soviet Union's last supper". This was the 1991 meal in the forests of Belarus between the presidents of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia's Yeltsin, after which they agreed to scrap the agreement forming the Soviet Union, made 70 years before. Polina Ivanovna was the chef and she had to make goulash from the wild boar shot by the Ukrainian president. "The next day they dismembered our country, just like that boar," she told Szabłowski regretfully. "And that was that." From the woman who cooked for Yuri Gagarin and the caterers who fed the Chernobyl firefighters, to the moving stories of two women who lived through Ukraine's 1932 Great Famine ("we're the daughters of cooks. That's how we survived"), Szabłowski's illuminating book offers a highly original insight into the key role played by food and cooking in the former Soviet Union.

£9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Pandora's Box Peter Biskind Essential viewing Peter Biskind is a cinema man. Best known for 1998's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and other books about the meaty, macho movie business, he has turned his attentions to the growth of streaming services and what might be the end of the current golden age of TV. The swaggering Pandora's Box attempts to wrangle a complex tale into some sort of order, from the early days of prestige TV, to the high-stakes and seemingly bottomless business of "content creation". But in the acknowledgments that conclude the book, Biskind still offers a secular prayer for the return of his preferred medium. "Movies, I hope, will one day make a comeback," he writes. For now, television will have to do. Pandora's Box is at its most enjoyable when it digs into the biggest TV dramas of the last three decades. There are great stories about the making of the shows, and insights into fallings-out and rash hirings and firings on the corporate side. Some anecdotes are gossipy, such as the one about how Steven Spielberg had his name taken off The Americans because he objected to the casting of Welsh actor Matthew Rhys. Others are just plain juicy. HBO apparently pushed back only twice on the content of the original Sex and the City series: once for a joke involving a dog and fellatio, and once for a shot that featured both condoms and a statue of the Virgin Mary. The point of the book, though, is that it builds towards a rupture, which arrives in the form of Netflix. Once a DVD rental service, Netflix changed everything when it gambled the house on streaming. Netflix established a ruthless new business model, which the TV networks followed, for fear of dying out if they didn't. Did it work? Biskind suggests that we reached "peak TV" in 2022, and that the decline is already well under way. Budgets are bloated beyond reason and sense. Corporations with deep pockets, such as Apple and Amazon, have moved into the market, funding mega-budget follies such as the middling Lord of the Rings adaptation, The Rings of Power. There is a relatively up-to-date analysis of the unfairness of the system, particularly for those who are actually being creative, rather than those selling the end product. Biskind quotes one former network exec as saying, "We are in a golden age of content production and the dark age of creative profit sharing", which is part of the reason for the recent industrial action in the US. Ever the movie guy, there is an occasional sense that Biskind is holding his nose. But when it comes to business, and the lurid details of what the rich and powerful get up to, Pandora's Box is beefy, garrulous and substantial. If it is a death knell for TV, it's a thoroughly entertaining one.

£9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop