Dave Eggers will be making a noontime appearance at Elliott Bay Book Company. Eggers will be promoting his new books Zeitoun and The Wild Things. Zeitoun is an immigrant story that is also a story about New Orleans. It's a novel based on a true story, much in the style of his What Is the What. Things is his enormous adaptation of his movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.

Annie Proulx reads at Benaroya Hall. I can't think of Annie Proulx without thinking of this amazing essay by B.R. Myers in The Atlantic.

"The Half-Skinned Steer" (which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, in November of 1997), starts with this sentence:

In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.

Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe "unraveling" didn't sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you've never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the first sentence!

This essay made me want to write book criticism. Annie Proulx has written lots of other things that are very good, but this essay will stick to her forever.

Two readers are at Chapel Performance Space in Wallingford. David Buuck, who co-founded Tripwire, has written The Shunt & Buried Treasure Island. Joe Felix is co-editor of LVNG and has written a chapbook titled Regional Noir.

And there's a double-reading at Open Books tonight, too. James Bertolino's latest book, Finding Water, Holding Stone , is partly about "a grim vision of existence." David Rigsbee's Two Estates explores "the rich materials of Mediterranean Europe."

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here. And if you're planning on staying in and you're looking for personalized book recommendations, feel free to tell me the books you like and ask me what to read next over at Questionland.