Now that Judge Kevin Haugh has described an RTE radio comedy sketch entitled Who Wants to be a Millionaire as "a clever and funny composition", it is clear there is a real and substantial risk that subsequent sketches on Five Seven Live can not be fairly judged by media commentators and critics.

Though the media are generally held to be impervious to the influence of the judiciary, various luminaries admitted at the weekend that they could be influenced by the judge's remarks, either consciously or unconsciously. "This prejudicial publicity is something we could have done without," said one prominent critic. "Because of the judge's high standing and reputation for integrity, the risk of a critic being influenced by his remarks is significantly enhanced."

All right. Not very funny. Hold on. Something more serious coming up.

Revulsed by Empedocles' idea of the fragmented body-parts in search of each other and Lacan's theory of morcellement, the dismemberment of the imagined body, Byatt's first-person narrator Phineas G. Nanson, in this new novel, decides to stop being a post-structuralist literary critic. And not before time, you imagine. The above is from our Weekend review of A.S. Byat's new book, The Biographer's Tale, and according to our reviewer, an odder novel will hardly be published this year.

I can't feel that confident - not when the latest publishing list from Wishton and Poddler includes the titles Bwana! Hit me Again!, Major-Gen Rostrevor Cull's memoir of his unusual relationship with his Indian servants in the days of the British Raj; and Fusther Wainscotting's Worm Time Calling, his own true story of life after death.

But look: it's not enough to write books, you've got to sell them too. Here's what you want, again from our Weekend pages, this time in advertising form: She's a big-haired bounty hunter. She keeps her gun in a cookie jar. She has nothing to wear to the neighbourhood Mafia wedding. The two sexiest men in New Jersey both want to get her into bed. It's just a normal day for Stephanie Plum . . . That's Janet Evanovich's High Five, and for the sexiest, sassiest summertime fiction, read this, you'll be hooked. No doubt you will. It doesn't matter that the bookshops are bulging with this type of literature, a deluge of snappy, sassy short-paragraphed chick-lit, it seems the reading public can't get enough of it.

In the publishing game, it's all about identifying markets. Not too long ago, some reviewer identified the latest emerging genre as that of the Disillusioned Widow Novel, one which would tell future generations a great deal about the doubts of 1990s woman. In this genre were books like Ruth Brandon's The Uncertainty Principle and Fay Weldon's Worst Fears, and sure enough, both sold pretty well. The Disillusioned Widow now appears to have had her day, and the most successful market of recent years is the genre of books appealing to people who don't normally read books, i.e. young people too busy with so-called real life. Irvine Welsh wrote some of the first of these, which were so successful that publishers raced to find other authors capable of hip and exciting communication with the cool new generation. Unfortunately, there was no one to match Welsh (or even come near him), but that did not deter publishers from promoting the promised land of the new genre.

However, rather self-conscious about the inherent weakness of the new literature, publishers came up with the bright idea of promoting the writers themselves rather than their actual work (a still-fashionable trend which has proved disastrous for those writers still clinging to the quaint notion that their work should speak for itself.) A classic of this genre was the collection of short stories, Disco Biscuits: New Fiction from the Chemical Generation (Sceptre), which according to its blurb contained "nineteen wild, out-there tales of drugs, sex, dance-floors, dealers, police and DJs". This collection was edited by a 26-year-old "global party correspondent" and the publishers were at pains to stress just how wild and out-there were the writers themselves.

One was "educated in the fed-up system they call private education", another "never held down a proper job . . .but he's doing okay now, married to a beautiful Russian spy", and another had a variety of jobs and now goes clubbing regularly. Never mind the stories - look at the writers. Irvine Welsh himself was among the 19 contributors, but is quite possibly the only one still writing. The others are no doubt too busy "living", and Welsh is a little too old for clubbing.