Dennis

Flann O'Brien's most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder.

Weird, satirical, and very funny, its popularity has suddenly increased with the mention of the novel in the TV series Lost.

In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.

Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. They compose a secret history, both intimate and panoramic, of modern times, and offer a kaleidoscopic impression of the world within a world that is Paris.

The Green Man's Maurice Allington is a worldly publican, but haunted. His pub is inhabited by the spirit of Dr Thomas Underhill, the seventeenth-century scholar rumoured to have killed his wife. The local sexton had refused to dig Underhill's grave. And the rector has declined to officiate at his funeral. And there are skeletons in the cupboard of Allington's own domestic affairs, just rattling to get out.

The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

This week in 1915, Saul Bellow, was born in Lachine, Quebec to parents recently emigrated from Russia. Bellow would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. Herzog, a story of surviving midlife crises and being Jewish in the middle part of the 20th century, is his masterpiece. "

The Dog of the South is the story of Ray Midge as he tracks down his wife, Norma, who has run off with her first husband, by following credit card receipts (his credit card!). Midge starts out in Norma's lover's compact car, which has 74,000 miles on it and a quarter-turn slack in the steering wheel (they took his Ford Torino!). The trail leads from Arkansas, down to Mexico, and into Honduras.

T.C. Boyle is hailed as "America's most imaginative contemporary novelist" ( Newsweek). In 1970, a California commune pulls up stakes and moves to the harsh interior of Alaska. The members establish Drop City, a back-to-the-land town, on a foundation of peace and free love. But their idealism cannot prevent tension from rippling through the group. The results are anything but predictable in this honest, surprising evocation of a time period and its enduring beliefs.

When Gussie Fink-Nottle, after a convivial evening with "Catsmeat" Pinbright, was sentenced to 14 days without the option for wading in the fountain at Trafalgar Square, Bertie Wooster saw the red light. But as usual, Bertie's involvement causes further entanglement, which only Jeeves can unravel.

Augie, the exuberant narrator-hero, is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Depression. His neighborhood friends settle down in various chosen professions; but Augie, as particular as an aristocrat, demands a special destiny. He latches on to a wild succession of occupations, then proudly rejects each one as too limiting. It is not until he tangles with a glamorous perfectionist named Thea, a huntress with a trained eagle, that his independence is seriously threatened. Luckily, his nature (like the eagle's) breaks down under the strain. He goes on to recruit himself to even more...