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1. Doug Nufer reads tonight at Elliott Bay Book Company. I reviewed his great new book By Kelman Out of Pessoa last month. It's a novel based on real-life horse-racing gambling experiments Nufer performed at Emerald Downs. Nufer will be reading from the book with accompaniment by another Seattle treasure, jazz saxophonist Wally Shoup. Nufer is a very entertaining performer, and when he teams up with Shoup, they're pretty electrifying. If you doubt Nufer's commitment to words, after the jump I have embedded not-very-well-shot video of Nufer's most recent performance, which was reading a long poem about a body of water while standing neck-deep in a river.

2. If your tastes are more mainstream, University Book Store hosts the mainstreamiest book critic there is tonight. First, Time Magazine's book reviewer Lev Grossman wrote a sloppy essay about how genre is the new literary fiction. Then he wrote a famously blowjobby essay praising literary fiction author Jonathan Franzen. Talk about mixed signals. Anyway, Grossman is in town with his book The Magician King, which is a sequel to his very popular fantasy novel The Magicians.

3. Find the next two weeks' worth of Seattle's literary events in our readings calendar.