9780399157202.jpeg
1. Nick Galifianakis will be appearing at the University Village Barnes & Noble this afternoon at 2 pm. He's a cartoonist (yes, he's related to Zach) and his latest book is If You Loved Me, You'd Think This Was Cute: Uncomfortably True Cartoons About You. Galifianakis illustrates Carolyn Hax's advice column. Here is a very, very uncomfortable interview with Galifianakis and Hax about their divorce.

2. Tomorrow afternoon, Siobhan Fallon reads at Elliott Bay Book Company. You Know When the Men Are Gone is her collection of linked short stories about military wives whose husbands have gone off to war. Fallon writes good, kind of typical literary fiction:

After her search turned up nothing, Ellen went home. She raced up the steps, telling herself that her children had returned and were right now sitting peaceably at the kitchen table, eating the strawberries left over from breakfast. But before she even opened the door she could sense the silence of a childless home, the kind of quiet that she usually longed for, greeting her like a slip into the bathtub, head ducking under the water, warm nothing filling the ears.

But what makes her stories compelling is their relationship to her own life; Fallon was a military wife whose husband served two tours in Iraq. You can feel the experience in these stories—they convey a personal weight to the reader in the way that non-fiction simply can't. Rather than contributing another lame memoir, Fallon made the right decision by writing stories. Her fiction is realer than real.

3. As far as readings go, it's kind of a light weekend, but you can find everything that is going on (including a bento box cookbook reading and a collection of poetry by a local author) in our readings calendar.