The fall edition of The Stranger’s books-and-music series features one of my favorite living novelists: Colson Whitehead has gone from weird genre fiction (The Intuitionist was a murder mystery about elevator investigators) to funny-as-hell fictionalized memoir (Sag Harbor) and back to genre fiction (his newest, Zone One, is a heart-tugging account of striving in the midst of a zombie apocalypse). He’ll read from Zone One, answer your (zombie- and non-zombie-related) questions, and be wildly entertaining all night long, with hot young psych-rockers the Curious Mystery playing before and after the reading. (Chop Suey, 1325 E Madison, 366-3333, 7 pm, $5 adv/$8 DOS, 21+)