There’s a poetry slam tonight and several other events, one of which is important.

Zoe Ferrarris reads at Third Place Books tonight, from her new mystery, Finding Nouf. I want to say the words “Zoe Ferrarris” all day long. And maybe I will. The book is set in contemporary Saudi Arabia, and it involves culture clashes, Muslim conservatism…and murder.

At the Chapel Performance Space in Wallingford, Deborah Meadows, who wrote a poetry collection called Goodbye Tissues, and Mickey O’Connor, who wrote Not Even Merely End, will be reading poetry. It is unclear whether their poetry will have a slam (or, indeed, a slammin’) element to it.

Norman Fischer, a zen teacher, reads at Elliott Bay Book Company from his book Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls. Everything about that title makes me want to vomit, and not from sea sickness. It seems as though, in the last few years, literary criticism has been replaced by these awful books about what the classics can do for (or say about) you. Correct answer: who cares? They’ll be around a lot longer than you anyway.

And at Town Hall, Mahvish Khan reads from My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me. Khan was a translator at Guantanamo. Everybody needs to know what’s going on in there, and not just in that comical prison rape kind of way. This is obviously the reading of the night.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is on our Books page.