Thousands of pages of the 19th-century French novel Madame Bovary that were cut by author Gustave Flaubert or censored have been posted online. The Independent reported Saturday that 4,500 pages of Flaubert's work were released, not just the some-500 pages in the published version. The British newspaper reported that 130 volunteers in dozens of countries worked to transcribe the material. They range from sixth-formers to a cleaning lady and an oil prospector, said Professor Danielle Girard, who coordinated the transcription work.

A survey released to coincide with World Book Day suggests two-thirds of Britons have lied about reading classic books such as Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. The survey of 1,342 people, commissioned by the organizers of Thursday's World Book Day, found 42 percent of those who admitted to lying about reading had claimed to have read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four without actually cracking open the tome while 31 percent said the same of War and Peace, The Daily Telegraph reported Thursday. An additional 25 percent of the admitted literary liars said they had claimed to read Ulysses by James Joyce, 24 percent claimed to have read the Bible and 16 percent claimed to have read Gustave Flaubert's Madam Bovary. Jonathan Douglas, director of Britain's National Literacy Trust, said people claim to have read books so they can seem more intelligent to potential mates. Research that we have done suggests that the reason people lied was to make themselves appear more sexually attractive, he sai

By Kathryn Harrison The Bad Girl By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. 276 pages. $25. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. * Once upon a time, in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, there was a good boy who fell in love with a bad girl.

By James Mackenzie PARIS (Reuters) - One of France's greatest private collections of manuscripts and rare editions from the giants of French literature fetched high prices late on Tuesday in the most closely watched auction of its type in years.