Over at Seattle Art Museum, there will be an event tonight celebrating Writers in the Schools' new anthology, You Will Not Come Back Unchanged. WitS is great program and the kids who take part in it are awesome. This should be uplifting in the least cloying way possible; if you're feeling bad about the future of the written word, come out for this.
Koren Zailckas reads at University Village Barnes & Noble tonight. Smashed was about Zailckas's life as a teenage drunk. Her new memoir, Fury , is about how sometimes she gets mad when she gets dumped and stuff. (It is a pretty boring book; I didn't finish it.) Smashed is the kind of book that really hits some people hard; if you're one of those people, you should come out for this. But don't buy Fury until after you hear Zalickas read from it; otherwise, you might be a little disappointed.
Charles Yu does a 4 pm reading at Elliott Bay Book Company and a 7 pm reading at University Book Store tonight. Yu's first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a novel about "a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction." It's about a time traveler named Charles Yu who is trying to find his father. It also features "lonely sexbots." This is a great Calvino-esque thrill ride of a book. I heartily recommend it, and you should come out and see Yu read. He's an exciting new author.
The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here. And if you're planning on staying in and you're looking for personalized book recommendations, feel free to tell me the books you like and ask me what to read next over at Questionland.
