The Picture of Dorian Gray must be the only novel in English with its own rules. The first chapter is preceded by a set of aphorisms which tell the reader as much about the mind of its author, Oscar Wilde, as they could want to know. No true artist, Wilde insists, has ethical sympathies as they are ‘an unpardonable mannerism of style’ There can be ‘no such thing as a moral or immoral book,’ because for a real artist vice and virtue are merely artistic materials. In this way, Wilde believes that all art is useless and yet we admire it intensely. But our love of art comes with danger. "All art", Wilde writes, "is at once surface and symbol" and those who go beneath the surface "do so at their peril".

Many have delved into the exotic, shadowy depths of Dorian Gray in search of Wilde’s real meaning, and now that it has been made this year’s One City, One Book, it is the turn of the people of Dublin.

A book launched today by Amnesty Ireland offers teachers and students an opportunity to learn about human rights by taking part in artistic activities.

Voice Our Concern is a project being run by Amnesty Ireland since 2004. It is a human rights education project that targets secondary school children to engage with Irish artists.

“Astonishing and yet ordinary”. These are the words Joe Meno uses to describe Thisbe Casper’s music in The Great Perhaps. He could just as well say the same for family.

(Interview with Joe Meno on Politico here)

The Great Perhaps is an adventure told through the eyes and lives of the Caspers.

Jonathan, the father, is a palaeontologist searching for a prehistoric squid that he hopes will connect the dots in evolutionary theory, thereby answering the scientific meaning of life.

Madeline, the mother, is an animal behaviourist. She cannot explain why the pigeons she studies are becoming increasingly aggressive.

In an interview with Shane Creevy on 10 April 2010, Joe Meno discussed American politics, his opinion on Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, the creative process, and his love for The White Album, Kurt Vonnegut and Thorton Wilder.

Joe Meno is an American novelist, playwright, poet and musician. His most recent novel, The Great Perhaps, was recently published in Ireland and the UK – his first book to do so – and won the Great Lakes Book Award for Fiction in 2009. His previous novels are Tender as Hellfire, How the Hula Girl Sings, Hairstyles of the Damned, and The Boy Detective Fails. He has also published two short story collections, Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir and Demons in the Spring. He won the Nelson Algren Literary Award and is Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia College, Chicago.

The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, confirms that many modern societies are social failures. By Edward O'Hare.

Where has the world gone wrong? These days you don’t have to be a vigilant monitor of current affairs to know that the rates of crime, anti-social behaviour, drug-use, and physical and mental ill-health are rising steadily throughout the developed world. Neither do you have to be an acutely sensitive individual to notice a coldness, an unfeeling disregard, has crept into everyday life.

Celebrities’ Favourite Books, recently published by Apex Publishing, is dedicated to those affected by dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. It contains around 100 articles from the well known and the not so well known – from Tony Blair to Jeffrey Archer, and others including Mohammed al Fayed, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Ben Elton, Alex Ferguson, Stephen Hendry, Glenn Hoddle, Gary Lineker, Ken Loach, Sam Neill and Terry Wogan.

The book consists of vignettes from each celebrity, offering their favourite book/s. (The recurring favourite is The Wind in the Willows!) Some contributions are one-liners, whereas others offer interesting and thoughtful interpretations.

The aim of the book is to highlight the plight of those who live with dementia and raise awareness of, and funds for, the valuable work carried out by the Alzheimer’s Society.

Legendary. Genius. Phenomenal.

Superlatives such as these rear their ugly faces far too often in popular usage. They are cheapened in a world of short-term disposable celebrities, where questions over the talent or wealth of said celebrities are hushed by a media world which pilfers to commercialism over public interest.

But.

When it comes to The Beatles...

From the silliest vaudeville (Maxwell’s Silver Hammer) to the politicised Revolution, from rock ‘n’ roll (Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey) to lullaby (Good Night), from the impassioned Something to carefully crafted pop – dare I say it – genius (Help, Drive My Car, Can’t Buy Me Love, Penny Lane, Hey Jude, too many more to mention), acoustic numbers (Blackbird, Mother Natures Son) and psychediala to boot (Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields Forever, Across the Universe), The Beatles’s music still lives on.

Stories are supposed to enchant us, to whisk us away to new or foreign worlds. Both Irish Tales and Vertue Rewarded, recently republished, accomplish this task.

The Early Irish Fiction project is a series of annotated, scholarly editions of Irish fiction from the long eighteenth century (about 1680 to 1820). The principal investigator is Professor Ian Campbell Ross. (Politico conducted an interview with him here.)