There’s a lot going on tonight. There’s a night of poetry with poets aged 25 to 85 at the Hugo House, an author of short stories up at Third Place Books, and a fictionalization of the Mount Saint Helens eruption out in Kirkland.

Charles Baxter is reading at the University Bookstore, from his new book The Soul Thief. Last year, he published this lovely little paperback original writing tutorial book called The Art of Subtext. I can’t really speak to it as a how-to-write-fiction book, but as a kind of mini-Seven Types of Ambiguity, it was pretty fantastic. Baxter also wrote The Feast of Love, which is the basis of, but is actually far superior to, last year’s Morgan Freeman-starring bomb, The Feast of Love.

James McBride, author of the memoir/love-letter-to-mom The Color of Water, is at Elliott Bay with his new novel, Song Yet Sung. I was at a McBride reading for his last novel, Miracle at St. Anna, and it was kind of sad: all everyone wanted to talk about was The Color of Water. Those are always the most depressing readings, when nobody cares about the new book. Maybe he’s grown past it.

Lastly, and perhaps most intriguingly, Jon Entine is at the Henry, discussing what it means, genetically speaking, to be Jewish.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.