1. If you're only planning to do one fun thing this weekend, I'd encourage you to go see my coworker David Schmader's solo play, A Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem, at the Hugo House. It's just terrific: Repeatedly laugh-out-loud funny, devastating, true, and very smart. I think it could very well be his single best piece of writing, and if you don't manage to find something of yourself in his performance, there's probably something wrong with you.

2. There's a fancy reading at Vermillion tonight. Local magazine Knock is celebrating the launch of their newest issue, which is "Safe Word"-themed. Stranger Genius Stacey Levine will read—nobody reads like Stacey Levine, and I mean that in the very best way—and local press Jaded Ibis will celebrate the release of their new novel, The Pornographers. That's a whole lot of stuff to pack into one free evening.

3. Also tonight, we just got an e-mail that Fancy Mud, the most recent production from surrealist vaudeville troupe Le Frenchword, is having a slushy Friday-night special for those who are willing to leave their homes. All tickets to tonight's showing of Fancy Mud at the Re-bar are just $10. I really liked Fancy Mud when I reviewed it back in September, calling it "a well-acted Three Stooges routine, plumped up on pretension and massive amounts of processed sugar."

4. Tomorrow night, Alexis M. Smith reads at Elliott Bay Book Company. Glaciers is a debut novel about Portland, about the Pacific Northwest, and about how people are all made up of a strange, non-linear mess of points in time and space. Read some of the book here. This looks like the big reading of the weekend.

5. Other weekend book events—including an appearance by Seattle Sounder Steve Zakuani at Secret Garden Bookshop!—can be found in the readings calendar.