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The Dead School (Dial) is Irishman PATRICK McCABE'S thorny third novel, in which the death by drowning of a student at a Catholic boys' school scars the lives of an inexperienced teacher and a cruel headmaster, who comes to be haunted by the voices of dead pupils.

Also this month: Perennial favorite RICHARD FORD'S latest is Independence Day (Knopf), the long-awaited sequel to The Sportswriter. Cold Snap (Little, Brown) is a collection of THOM JONES'S testosterone-charged short stories. MARY KARR'S East Texas memoir, The Liars' Club (Viking), traces her twisted family tree. An al 1-Native American rock band is the subject of SHERMAN ALEXIE'S first novel, Reservation Blues (Grove Atlantic). GEOFF NICHOLSON'S audaciously funny Everything and More (St. Martin's) is structured like a rambling London department store. CALVIN TRILLIN, that irrepressible wag, bestows on us a bouquet of topical essays, Too Soon to Tell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The photographer who captured the soul of Depression-era America is the focus of BELINDA RATHBONE'S winning Walker Evans: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin). Former duffer DAVID OWEN rests his putter and aims to amuse in My Usual Game (Villard). Rock scribe BILL FLANAGAN went on the road with the Irish Uber-band to research U2 at the End of the World (Delacorte). KARL LAGERFELD: Off the Record (D.A.P.) offers a rare peek into the designer's private amusements. Men cast off their metaphorical ties (and clothing) in GIANNI VERSACE'S Men Without Ties (Abbeville).

And four big, sloppy licks for AMY HEMPEL and JIM SHEPARD, who edited Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs (Crown), in which famous writers channel the verse of their poetic pooches. Woof!

ELISSA SCHAPPELL