Work's Intimacy
by Melissa Gregg (Polity, £14.99)
Is your working life afflicted by an increasing taskload, the "coercive dimensions" of teamwork, longer hours, job insecurity and the intrusion of labour into personal life? Then Gregg's brilliant book, based on anthropological research in Brisbane but of global significance, will show you that you are not alone. With subtle observation, she uncovers modern technology's pressures: for example, that "the hegemony of the 'contact'" in communications software reflects the deliberate blurring of the categories "colleague" and "friend", or that a woman who works from home "uses email to perform her competence and diligence for those who are still in the office".
Writing of organisations that continue to demand unidirectional "loyalty" from their workers, and of a woman whose office contacted her on every single day of her maternity leave, Gregg conveys a coolly controlled anger while coining powerful descriptions such as "function creep" and "binge work". Her interviewees, baffled but trying, elicit our empathy, even those who have internalised the brutalist jargon of the modern office. If I ever use "progress" or "action" as a transitive verb, please shoot me.

Litter
by Theodore Dalrymple (Gibson Square, £9.99)
I had better be careful what I say about this, since after writing that "Dalrymple is surely a modern master of declinology" when reviewing a previous book, I find myself quoted in online publicity as having written that "Dalrymple is a modern master" tout court, presumably of everything. I do not deny that he is qualified, at least, to write a book about rubbish. Dalrymple noticed an awful lot of litter on the roadside once while driving from London to Glasgow, which has given him leave to conduct another gloomily declinological diagnosis of British society in general.
Our litter problem, it seems, is the symptom of bad eating, bad parenting, "the cult of spontaneity and authenticity" and resentment of government  the last of which the author appears to share, inveighing against the unconscionably bloated state (presumably his own medical work is not to be counted as part of the bloat). Despite the shoddy copy-editing, there are, as always with this writer, many moments of pleasurable tartness: "The notion of rights [. . .] is highly inflammatory to weak minds." Near the end, after some brief metaphysical speculation, Dalrymple confides touchingly: "I am relieved that I am not writing about the philosophy of mind, a subject far too difficult for me." Assuredly a modern mister.

Neurolinguistic Programming: A Practical Guide
by Neil Shah (Icon Books, £6.99)
Icon's new "Introducing" series promises "Big Ideas for Real Life", as opposed, I assume, to ideas for virtual reality or pretend death. This self-helper on "NLP" recommends various strategies of visualisation, positive thinking and the like, dispensing mini-spurts of possibly inconsistent wisdom along the way ("people work perfectly," but "your brain isn't quite as clever as it thinks it is"). NLP, on this description, is a kind of pseudo-algorithmic approach to self-improvement. The likeably upbeat author sketches its origin in "computer science and linguistics", and the implication of the "programming" model seems indeed to be that other people are biddable robots, in which you can "create virtually any and all states" by using "embedded commands". These embedded commands seem like useful things. See if you can spot the one I have cunningly hidden in the following sentence. What would it be like if you bought a book by that guy who writes Et Cetera in the Guardian?