Slog

An open mic and two readings tonight.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Kathleen Flinn reads from The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry. It’s a memoir about how she went to fancy culinary school and fell in love. Kind of like that “hit” movie No Reservations, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart.

And at Town Hall, and in our Stranger Suggests, Sean Wilsey and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein will read from State by State, which is a terrific new anthology. There are fifty different essays by fifty different writers about each of the states. It’s my favorite book of the fall so far. I reviewed the book a couple weeks ago:

Some of the writers are locals: Dave Eggers writes a heartfelt manifesto about why Illinois is the best state ever, in part because it “ranks first in contradictions, in self-delusions, in strange dichotomies.” Others, like Ellery Washington, who writes an eerie tribute to New Mexico’s atomic industry, are transplants. Others, like David Rakoff, who writes a hilarious anthropology of the institutional racism of Utah’s Mormons, are just visiting. A few essays, like Alison Bechdel’s Vermont piece, try to be at least vaguely comprehensive about their state’s history and geography, but most, like John Hodgman’s disinterested paean to Massachusetts’s primary dilemma (“How you leave home when you just can’t bear to leave home”), only try to capture a certain ethereal feeling of what it means to be in that state.

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