VIKRAM SETH

The Calcutta-born author of A Suitable Boy returns with An Equal Music, a novel at whose end Michael Dirda of The Washington Post says he cried "just as I did at the final paragraphs of Nabokov's Lolita, A. S. Byatt's Possession, and James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime." High heart-on-the-sleeve praise indeed (though The Stranger's intelligent and incredibly erudite Traci Vogel simply shrugged when I asked her if it was any good). Just released in paperback, Seth will be reading from this new one about passion, music, and love both lost and found, with its purportedly tear-jerking denouement. Count the tears and judge for yourself. Kane Hall, UW Campus, 634-3400, 7 pm, free (tickets available at University Book Store).

*SCOTT PETERSON

A graduate of Mt. Rainier High School, Peterson spent some harrowing years traveling the war-ravaged continent of Africa as a foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph of London. According to Peter Matthiessen, this courageous journalist's new book, Me against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda, is "a relentless account of local, civil and ethnocidal war." Peterson is currently the Middle East correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 5 pm, free (tickets available at store).

IANTHE BRAUTIGAN

Richard Brautigan was the late-stage Beat author of the cult classic Trout Fishing in America, a beautifully written, time-twisting, absurdist novel that has absolutely nothing to do with fishing. While doing research into her father's life as a wacky '60s writer, Ianthe discovered an unfinished manuscript entitled An Unfortunate Woman--an autobiographical novel that deals with both papa Brautigan's rift with his daughter and his obsession with suicide. Of course, she's written her own intimate story about her hippie dad, called You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir. Come on down and get the inside poop. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400, 7 pm, free and easy.

ROBERT SACHS

Whenever I hear the words feng shui, I reach for my revolver. And now there's this hokey hooey for spiritually illiterate yuppies drowning in their own materialistic nihilism: Nine Star Ki: Astrological Companion to Feng Shui, which is touted as a flighty guide to one of the "most accessible astrological systems for modern times." Outward gaze and inner paths my ass! Barnes & Noble, Pacific Place, 600 Pine, 264-0156, noon, free.

PAUL THEROUX

Theroux is probably best known for his million-selling novel The Mosquito Coast, a sort of cautionary, sub-par Conradian tale about one family's Oedipal descent into the dark heart of American ambition and arrogance that was made into an edgy John Boorman film starring Harrison Ford and a young River Phoenix. Tonight he will be reading from, discussing, and signing Fresh Air Friend (a companion piece to his previous Sunrise with Seamonsters), a new collection of travel writings "ranging from his early adventures as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa to a more modern week in the snowbound Maine woods." Theroux's voluminous documentary writings, according to The Cleveland Plain Dealer, reveal "the comedic, the Bureaucratically tangled, and the marvelous... like all good journeys should be." Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 634-3400, 7:30 pm, free (tickets available through University Book Store).

ROBERT SACHS

See morally outraged Thursday listing. Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3300, noon, free.

IANTHE BRAUTIGAN

See gossipy Thursday listing. Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 5 pm, free (tickets available at store).

JEFFERY LENT

This Vermont writer's debut novel, In the Fall, is yet another pseudo-historical rumination on the legend and legacy of the American Civil War, à la Charles Frazier's hugely successful Cold Mountain. Surely, the whiskey-drenched corpse of Faulkner is rolling over in his grave at this new fad in Southern fiction by Yanks, but in all fairness, the advance praise sounds pretty promising. "A marvelous and provocative piece of American fiction," says the Kirkus Review, and Jim Harrison (one of my favorite writers) calls the work "a fulsome and harrowing tale." Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 8 pm, free (tickets available at store).

NEBULA CELEBRATION

Beam down, set your phasers on stun, and join this cosmic squadron of 20 luminous science fiction writers who will all be signing their latest works for the typical agglomeration of geeks, goobers, and goons from the distant solar systems of sci-fi fanaticism. Among the featured scribes will be Greg Bear, Jane Jensen, Kij Johnson, Richard Paul Russo, and the author of ((FREQUENCIES)), Seattle's very own Joshua Ortega. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400, 7:30 pm, free admission with intergalactic passport.

JOHN GRANT

It's impossible to understate the historical importance of the U.S. railway system. From the seminal (and often brutal) laying of the first rails, to the rapid growth of industry and urban sprawl with westward expansion, trains provided the original connective movement for both the human and material stuff of the great American Dream: big economy, obsessive progress, constant locomotion. Grant, a choo-choo enthusiast and author of Great American Rail Journeys, takes readers "on location to some of North America's most scenic and historically rich landscapes." Sounds nostalgic. Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3300, noon, free.

*STELLA DONG

See Bio Box. Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 3 pm, free (tickets available at store).

THUBTEN CHODRON

Henry Miller once said that if you go far enough west, you end up in the east. Get it? Blossoms of the Dharma: Living as a Buddhist Nun, a book Elizabeth Napper said is full of "the power and force of an ordained life," is the most recent offering of this Seattle-based author. Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 7:30 pm, free (tickets available at store).

TOM ROBBINS

Stranger writer and all-around great guy Grant Cogswell so perfectly explicated the neo-hippie lameness of Robbins' hack writing in a brilliantly composed and acid-tongued recent letter to some other local weekly that I absolutely must quote it here: "Your work is just another brick in the wall of complacency that surrounds many folks of your generation (and mine) who think they are part of a counter-culture when they are really just sitting around reading their own auras as the commercials get louder and the forests are paved." Robbins' new novel is called Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, and if you're dumb enough to buy it, you can get it signed by this mendacious, lazy, uninspired still-life of a chump. Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 3 pm, free for dupes of all ages.

JONATHAN KOZOL

Kozol, a multi-award winning writer of ineffable sociological import (Amazing Grace, Death at an Early Age), will be having a very busy day in Seattle's University Temple Methodist Church, indeed. First, he's giving a sermon for the morning service based on his experience with impoverished youth (the event to be a benefit for the Atlantic Street Center), followed by a reception and book signing for his newest study, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope. Then, at 7:00 that same evening, Kozol will be giving a reading and signing of said new book, which will also be a benefit for the Alliance of Education. God bless you, Mr. Kozol, and amen. University Temple United Methodist Church, 1415 NE 43rd St, 634-3400, service at 10:45 am; reading at 7 pm, tickets required (available free at University Book Store).

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

See Stranger Suggests. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 322-7030, 7:30 pm, $12 (tickets available at Elliott Bay Book Company and via Seattle Arts & Lectures).

GRANT COGSWELL

See egregiously nepotistic Stranger Suggests. Little Theatre, 608 19th Ave E, 675-2055, 7:30 pm, $3.

ROBERT FERRIGNO

This event, hosted (in cooperation with Sisters in Crime) by the author of such California-noir crime novels as Heartbreaker, is billed as a "great talk for writers or anyone interested in the craft of good fiction." Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3300, 7 pm, free.

DERRICK JENSEN

This author's memoir, A Language Older Than Words, is touted as a book that defies categorization (which can mean one of two things), so I'll just let him speak for himself, and you figure it out: "Our abuse of each other and of the world emerges from how we are raised to perceive each other and the world. If someone were raised to perceive others as little more than objects to be exploited, it should come as no surprise when that person behaves in an exploitive manner." Had enough? Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3300, 7 pm, free.

JUNE JORDAN

The author of Soldier: A Poet's Childhood will be reading from and signing her new book. Sponsored by Elliott Bay Books. Mt. Zion Baptist Church, 1634 19th Ave, 624-6640, 7:30 pm, free.

*PAUL BEATTY

The author of the critically well-received debut The White Boy Shuffle now brings out this sophomore effort, entitled Tuff. The novel is described by Publishers Weekly as "a zany, riotous concoction of nonstop hip-hop chatter and brilliant mainstream social satire... [which] depicts the unusual coming-of-age of 19-year-old, obese African-American Winston Tuffy Foshay, who tries to rise above his rough-and-tumble life on the vicious streets of Spanish Harlem." Yet another recent review I read somewhere seemed to accuse Beatty of breaking no new ground in the black coming-of-age genre forged by the likes of Claude Brown and Ralph Ellison, and yet doing so with style. Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 7:30 pm, free (tickets available at store).

STACY SCHIFF

Have you, in off moments, ever wondered what it might have been like to be the main squeeze of the pretty-prose author of Lolita? Considered "a fascinating person in her own right," Vera Slonim Nabokov (a.k.a. Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) "played a pivotal role in the nurturing and caretaking of one of the century's great writers and minds." Behind ever great... well, you know the story. Schiff's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Vera, has been praised as an "unsentimental portrait of a marriage" that often matches the elegance of Nabokov's prose. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400, 7 pm, free.

ALAIN DE BOTTON

See Stranger Suggests. Seattle Public Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, 386-4650, 7 pm, free (no advance tickets).