MUSIC: Frequenter of the Hotel Chelsea, Country Joe McDonald (pictured at Woodstock) will be taking the Joe's Pub stage tonight to perform a tribute to Woody Guthrie where he "deftly conveys all the charm, talent, and social and political consciousness of the legendary folksinger from Oklahoma."

7pm // Joe’s Pub [425 Lafayette St] // $30

EVENT: Move over spelling bee...The Define-a-Thon Word Challenge hits Brooklyn tonight. The competitive word challenge is good for the spelling-impaired, you just need to know how to use the words in a sentence! The event is part of National Define-a-Thon Week (who knew?) and prizes will be awarded to winners.

7:30pm // WORD [126 Franklin Street, Greenpoint] // Free

READING: Tonight Stephen King kicks off Symphony Space's literary event series with The Best American Short Stories of 2007. The author "introduces three of the page-turners he selected for the collection he edited. Each one delivers a 'sense of emotional involvement, of flipped-out amazement…like a big hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky.'" That's one way of putting it.

7:30pm // Peter Jay Sharp Theatre [2537 Broadway at 95th St] // $30

THEATER: The world renowned National Theatre of Greece brings their production of Sophocles’s Electra to City Center tonight for a six show run that ends Sunday. This Electra is Sophocles’s take on the bloody fallout that ensues after Clytemnestra’s assassination of her husband Agamemnon (and his new mistress Cassandra) as payback for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. (It’s a long story.) This production carries the added cachet of legendary director Peter Stein, whose ten hour staging of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein just closed in Berlin. (If you think ten hours is long, you must have missed his 21-hour rendition of Faust.) Not to worry about Electra, though, Stein gets you in and out in a breezy two hours or less. (With supertitles.) – John Del Signore

8pm // NY City Center [W. 55th St between 6th & 7th] // Ticket prices vary.