MONDAY Elliott Bay Book Company and the Hedgebrook writing colony join forces to bring novelist Parnaz Foroutan to Seattle to read from her novel The Girl from the Garden, an Iranian family drama. Gloria Steinem gives this one a rousing blurb: “A powerful and moving novel about the devastating choices women face when their worth is tied to their wombs but not themselves. Parnaz Foroutan takes the timeless themes of love, honor, sacrifice, and betrayal, and makes them new.”

WEDNESDAY Hugo House hosts a release party for a book titled Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology. Local writers who are in the book (a list including Amy Schrader, Evan J. Peterson and Sierra Nelson) will read their tarot-themed poetry. Nelson, especially, is a favorite of mine, and she thrives when she’s writing poetry on a theme. (She wrote an excellent book of choose-your-own-adventure poetry.) There will also be a tarot reader at this one, if you’re into that kind of thing.

THURSDAY Dock Street Press publisher Dane Bahr has been hosting monthly literary salons up at Phinney Books for a while now, and the latest one features Anca Szilagyi and Angela Fountas. Fountas has a new book coming out from Dock Street soon. It’s titled The Good Girl, and it’s a collection of short stories. These events are generally low-key affairs, with plenty of time to talk before and after the reading (and usually some booze kicking around, too).

FRIDAY We don’t usually feature the same writer twice in one week, but these two events are so different that we had to include them. University Book Store hosts a reading from the Jack Straw Writers Program, which teaches writers how to present their work aloud, both in recordings and in live readings. Three writers from Jack Straw’s most recent crop of authors will read tonight: Spartan co-founder Ross McMeekin, Matthew Schnirman, and — her again? — Anca Szilagyi. Go find out what they learned.

SATURDAY The August doldrums return; there doesn’t seem to be a single book-related event happening today. Maybe you should go check out the scene at Pax. At the very least, you can use all the cosplayers as a writing prompt.

SUNDAY Up at Lake Forest Park, Third Place Books presents a signing from Sue Grafton. Grafton has been writing the Kinsey Milhone mysteries — the ones with the alphabet titles — for decades now. How long has it been? Well, they started out as a contemporary series set in 1982. Now they’re a period piece still taking place in the 1980s, due to the internal chronology of the narrative moving much slower than the real world. The final book in the series, which is scheduled to be released in 2019, will be set in 1990. What started as a mystery series has become a weird time-warp; this is an impressive literary feat. The newest book is titled X. If you want to get your book signed, you have to buy a ticket from Third Place by the 25th, so get on it.