There's a lot going on tonight.

At the Barnes & Noble in the University Village, T.C. Boyle is interviewed by the person who edits Barnes & Noble's inhouse magazine. Hopefully, it will be as incisive and challenging an interview as those book reviewing journalists at Barnes & Noble are usually capable of. I've not been crazy for T.C. Boyle's stuff lately, but his early short stories (collected in the big fat book Stories) are great.

Speaking of big-name authors, E. Lynn Harris reads at Elliott Bay Book Company, from Basketball Jones. This is a novel about a basketball player learning about life and love.

At Third Place Books, Debra Gwartney reads from Live Through This, which is a non-fiction account of how the author's two daughters ran away from home.

Down in Tacoma, an actor is performing a one-man play about Edgar Allan Poe. Before the play, authors will be reading their parodies of Poe's work.

And there's a lot going on in the U District. There's a lecture titled "Israel: Facing a Reconfigured Middle East and a New US Administration," and there's another, unaffiliated lecture with the ambitiously specific title of "Alternative Conceptions of Body and Gender in 19th-Century Finnish Magic Narratives."

But the reading of the night is at University Book Store. Dan Simmons reads from Drood. I wrote about this book in the book section last week. Here's some of what I had to say:

Drood is about the horrors and pains of being a novelist. It's a book about the heartbreak of putting years of your life into a book, populating it with all the wonders and terrors that live in your head, and watching that book receive no attention at all on its release, as though it were published in invisible ink. It's about being friends with another novelist you suspect is your superior (it's said that T. S. Eliot once called Collins "Charles Dickens without the genius") and you know is better loved by the general public, and also knowing that there's nothing you can do to change that.

The story of literature can be told entirely in friendly and not-so-friendly rivalries (Bacon and Shakespeare, Plath and Hughes, Marston and Jonson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Amis and Barnes—hell, Amis and Amis).

It's a very good book and you should go to the reading.

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