There is so much good stuff going on tonight that one almost wishes that there was an iron-fisted ruler of book readings who could make bookstores apportion out their good author events evenly.

Firstly, Matthew Sharpe is reading at the University Book Store. His book, Jamestown, just came out in paperback. It’s a weird, beautifully written dystopian sci-fi novel. It’s one of those dense books that incorporates a made-up language and takes weeks to read successfully, but it’s totally worth it.

At the Seattle Public Library, Tan Twan Eng reads from his book The Gift of Rain. I wrote a Lunch Date about it, and I have to admit that I haven’t finished reading it, although I liked what I read a lot. I also lamented not being able to find a representative quote for the book, and commenter Janet Brown said that this isn’t a sign of badness:

You’re right—I love this book and have read it twice, but can’t pull an individual “representative quote” that gives a sound bite for this book. The observations and descriptions stop me in my reading tracks with the world and the thoughts that they evoke, but they are part of a fictional fabric, tightly woven to form a cohesive picture. Pulling them apart does the novel no service.

So there you go. I happen to know Janet—she’s one of the three people I’ve met who reads more than me—and I trust her implicitly.

John Olson, who is a Stranger Genius, reads at Open Books tonight. Christopher Frizzelle wrote a lovely profile about Olson here. Here’s part of what he had to say:

Olson is a poet of excess and expansion. His best poems are rich, sturdy, absurd, startling, tightly strung, and scattershot. The second poem in 1996’s Swarm of Edges begins: “It sounds funny but an orange/is not a television//so much as the imagination/of a limb.”

And at Town Hall, Augusten Burroughs is reading from his new book, A Wolf at the Table. Former Stranger Public Intern Steven Blum wrote a review of Burroughs’ new book for us, but it had to be cut from last week’s paper for space considerations. it will run in this week’s paper, but I’m also including the whole review after the jump as an early treat for Slog readers. Here’s a taste:

Augusten’s father can’t stand his gay son. His mother tries to protect him from dad, but she also suffers from the unfortunate Burroughs family compulsion to record every depressing moment of her life on a typewriter in her room. Without a mom or dad to talk to about being a baby ‘mo, Burroughs fantasizes about killing his dad fifty gazillion times, but never does. Because every single character in the book is depressed, and repressing every single emotion, nothing is ever really said and little actually happens.

I second young Steven’s opinion: I like a lot of Burroughs’ earlier stuff, particularly Dry, but this book is a total bust. I look forward to Burroughs’ next book, which I believe will be a novel.

And then there’s also a grammar book, a sports book, a book about a man who kayaked from Idaho to the Pacific, and the eighth book in a series of southern mysteries starring vampires and other monsters, all of which you can find out more about in our full readings calendar.

I like funny memoirs. Reading Sedaris encouraged me to look at my own family interactions from the exciting new vantage of a tragicomedy writer. “One day I’ll turn this steaming shit into comic gold!” I told myself, contentedly, as yet another family dinner imploded. I expected to read A Wolf at the Table with a familiar mixture of horror and glee. Sadly, Burroughs’ new book won’t make you laugh or cry, or really feel any emotion whatsoever. A Wolf at the Table is a confused and disjointed attack against Burroughs’ father that spirals into nowhere.

The book starts boring and gets worse. Baby Augusten really wants to hug his dad, a psychotic philosophy teacher with bloody psoriasis all over his body. “Patches of silvery, flaking skin, raw and meat-red underneath, expanded on his body,” he writes. This kind of shock writing is what made Burroughs famous in the first place, but here it’s exhausting.

Augusten’s father can’t stand his gay son. His mother tries to protect him from dad, but she also suffers from the unfortunate Burroughs family compulsion to record every depressing moment of her life on a typewriter in her room. Without a mom or dad to talk to about being a baby ‘mo, Burroughs fantasizes about killing his dad fifty gazillion times, but never does. Because every single character in the book is depressed, and repressing every single emotion, nothing is ever really said and little actually happens.

Along the way to nowhere, Burrroughs has epiphanies he thinks are wholly original and totally fascinating. On his father: “his ejaculations had created me…one erection, a number of thrusts, a release. And there I stood.”

Don’t we already know the minutia of Burroughs’ terrible childhood? We do! And Running With Scissors was a masterpiece compared to this drivel. You know when you read your diary sometimes and nothing interesting has happened and you think to yourself, “Well…fuck. This would make a bad book”? This is a thought that’s never passed through Burroughs’ head. He needs to go outside and plant some petunias and keep his stories about his fucked up father between him and his therapist. Don’t buy the book. STEVEN BLUM