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Thursday, April 7, 2011

Books More Local Than You Think

Posted by Paul Constant on Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 3:24 PM

Local authors abound tonight! At SPU Art Center Gallery, Gina Ochsner will be reading. The Seattle Pacific U faculty member will read from either one of her two short story collections, The Necessary Grace to Fall and People I Wanted to Be, or from her very good debut novel, The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight, or she will read something else entirely. Also in the Queen Anne area, Jonathan Evison will be reading up at the very tippy-top of the hill at Queen Anne Books. He has traveled the country reading from his new novel West of Here—my review is here—and so this is your first chance in at least a month to see him read in a Seattle-area bookstore.

And at University Book Store, Marjorie Garber and David Shields will be reading and in conversation. Garber wrote The Use and Abuse of Literature. It reportedly "draw[s] a solid line in the sand" between what literature is what literature is not. Shields's Reality Hunger, now out in paperback, says that fiction is dead. The two authors will fight to the death. Or chat politely. You know, one or the other.

Meanwhile, at Town Hall, John Perkins will be reading. Hoodwinked is the newest economic-minded book by the author of the very popular and very good Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It is about how to save ourselves from the corporate-ish hellhole we now live in. I didn't even realize until I was putting this week's calendar together that Perkins is a Bainbridge Island-based author.

There's a lot more, including a few authors from out of town, too, in our readings calendar.