Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from Nov 30 - Dec 6

MONDAY Happy new week! I’m sorry to report that tonight’s reading with xkcd’s Randall Munro and Hank Green at Town Hall is sold out. Instead, you should visit Campion Ballroom at Seattle University for Jon Meacham. Meacham is an excellent presidential biographer, and his newest book is about George Herbert Walker Bush. Destiny and Power is a much-needed spotlight on the somewhat-reasonable-in-retrospect man who sired two dullards with presidential aspirations.

TUESDAY Seattle Arts and Lectures brings poet Srikanth Reddy to McCaw Hall. Check out the beginning of Reddy’s poem “Burial Practices”:

Then the pulse.

Then a pause.

Then twilight in a box.

Dusk underfoot.

Then generations.

Whoooa. That's some good stuff. According to press materials, “Reddy's talk will consider a range of questions concerning poetry and poetics, including theories of likeness, ekphrasis, technology, and wonder.” Sold!

WEDNESDAY Christopher T. Bayley reads from his new book Seattle Justice: The Rise and Fall of the Police Payoff System in Seattle at Town Hall Seattle. It’s a true crime story that begins with this sentence: “It was a sunny day in July, and Seattle perched on a gray-green sound edged by mountains: the Cascades formed a wall on the east, the Olympics rose and fell along the west.”

THURSDAY Tonight’s pick for best event is Pay Dirt at the Rendezvous. Local writers Anca L. Szilágyi, Bernard Grant, Emily Bedard, Martha Kreiner, and Matthew Schnirman “explore art, money, and desire in new fiction and poetry.” This event will be hosted by Poetry Northwest’ magazine’s Kevin Craft, who is an excellent host. It’s always interesting when writers talk about money.

FRIDAY Elliott Bay Book Company hosts a launch party for Mairead Case’s See You In the Morning, which is a book about three seventeen-year-olds told in paragraph-length poems.

SATURDAY It’s time for Urban Craft Uprising at Seattle Center. Why not go and support Seattle’s biggest and best craft show? They’ve got plenty of paper craft on display, including some gorgeous letterpress printers.

SUNDAY University Book Store’s Bellevue branch hosts authors Maia Chance, Janine A. Southard, Raven Oak, and G. Clemans. Their anthology, Joy to the Worlds, is a collection of holiday-themed sci-fi and mystery short stories. (The publishers of this book sponsored the Seattle Review of Books last month, but they did not pay for this recommendation; I think it sounds like the best event of the day.) Go and have a very genre holiday.