There's a lot going on tonight, including two authors who read yesterday, a diet which revolves around fitting into your favorite pairs of jeans, and a $45 wine-and-appetizer buffet with a guy who wrote a book about buffalo.

At Town Hall, there are two events. Ann Holmes Redding, who alleges that she is both a Muslim and a Christian, reads from her book Out of Darkness Into Light: Spiritual Guidance in the Quran with Reflections from Jewish and Christian Sources. Then, a little later, The Organization of American Historians begin the very long, laborious process of analyzing the 2008 election. This sounds like fun to me, but I bet it'll give a lot of people a whole lot of indigestion.

The Hugo House is hosting Cheap Wine & Poetry, a well-curated reading series (the curator has seen all the performers read before at other venues, which means that the readers are guaranteed to be entertaining at reading their own work) at which wine is a buck a glass.

Mark Von Schlegell reads at Elliott Bay Book Company from his science fiction novel Mercury Station, which purports to be about outer space and the rise and fall of civilizations.

And last but certainly not least, Stacey Levine has a launch party for her newest book of short stories, The Girl With Brown Fur, at Bailey/Coy Books. I wrote about Levine's newest book in the book section this week:

Levine's stories are rare and mysterious things, and confronting them in a book makes them feel less wondrous somehow.

They all begin compellingly: "Hallo. I'm a fool. I married Mike Sump." "Imagine being a bean: a pale supplicant, rimy dot, a belly-wrinkled pip, lying enervated on the kitchen chair, trying too hard all the time." "Oh, to be Bill Miller, the unreachable one with the invulnerable eyes, the 35-speed bike, the sixty years more of life and a future as good as real." Some of the stories are plain as day; others are willfully obtuse, as though jealously guarding a secret. You can't just read fiction by Levine the way you'd appreciatively read a short story by, say, Alice Munro. You have to pry the words apart like a poem and trust the language to reveal something of value.

She's one of the best short story authors in the Northwest, and she's doing a lot of readings in town this month. I hope you'll attend at least one of them.

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