Two thrillers, three open mics (including one at the Hugo House with wine for a buck a glass,) and so much more going on tonight.

Anita Boser is up at Third Place with Relieve Stiffness & Feel Young Again with Undulation, a book that shows how in just ten minutes a day you can blah blah and etc. Only one human being can build a better, stronger you in just minutes a day, and that human being is Charles motherfucking Atlas, motherfuckers.

Clay Shirky, a name that I adore, is at the U Bookstore with Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, about the rise of Wiki and the Internet. This could be pretty interesting, if the reading isn’t commandeered by a bunch of marketers trying to figure out how to exploit Wikis. Every so often, seemingly at random, a gaggle of ad people will show up at a reading in their fancy clothes, and take notes and ask business questions and suck the life out of the room. I blame Malcolm Gladwell, myself.

Stacy Levine and Lou Rowan are at Third Place Books. Levine published a terrific novel called Frances Johnson out of Clear Cut Press (Whatever happened to those guys? They were totally poised to be the Northwest McSweeney’s and then they disappeared) a few years ago. Rowan is the author of My Last Days, an autobiography of Superman. I was psyched to read this book—I’m a sucker for anything Superman that’s not endorsed by Time Warner—but it’s so riddled with typos that I couldn’t read it. A blurb on the back had a typo, fer crissakes. Everybody’s human, I know, and I’m really not that nit-picky when it comes to typos, but one or two or three or four typos per page is just ridiculous.

The big reading of the night is Dominique Fabre, reading from The Waitress Was New, his first novel to be translated from French to English. It’s about a waiter who’s worked at a restaurant for a very long time. Fabre’s written nine novels and has been given so many awards in France that he must walk with a hunchback from carrying all of them around.

If you’re not in the mood for something Gallic, perhaps Jody Rosen, Slate’s music critic, at Town Hall will be more your thing. Rosen is talking about “Jewish dialect songs and novelty hits performed by vaudeville’s Hebrew comedians,” and what that racist self-parody meant for Jews in America and for the performers themselves. The talk is called “Jewface.” That oughta rile up some folks in the audience.

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