READING: Here's something awesome to spice up your week - from Housing Works Used Book Cafe's website: "Jest Fest 06, a celebration of the 10th Anniversary of David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST. Join John Krasinski (The Office), Todd Hanson (The Onion), Lev Grossman (Time Magazine), and Laura Miller (Salon) in reading from and talking about the book. Audience participation strongly encouraged!" Nerdy goodness abounds! - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // Housing Works Used Book Cafe......

READING: Head down to 192 Books for a very special and cool evening - James Salter, short fiction writer, teamed with his wife Kay on Life Is Meals, a illustrated food lover's companion that takes readers from a Twelfth Night cake in January to a champagne dinner on New Year's Eve. As always with 192 Books, call ahead to reserve a spot at their readings. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // 192 Books [192 10th......

THEATER: Pieces of Paradise is a benefit presentation of four lost plays by Tennessee Williams which were discovered in a trunk in 2000 and never produced in New York. The proceeds will benefit a legal fund for 13th Street Repertory (founded in 1972), which is struggling for survival against - you guessed it - real estate developers. It’s fitting that these plays should be chosen for the benefit, as Tennessee himself visited the theater when......

READING: Head to the New School to join the New York Times and their moderator, critic William Grimes, as Carl Hiaasen reads from his latest crime caper, Nature Girl, which chronicles the exploits of volatile Honey Santana who meets a wild cast of characters while en route to the Ten Thousand Islands. Show up early for a good seat - Hiaasen is a popular draw. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 6:30pm // The New School [Tishman......

READING: Head down to that bastion of drinking and writing combined, KGB Bar, tonight to see a local combination that should be interesting - Park Slope darling Myla Goldberg (Bee Season) and suburbia veteran Rick Moody (The Ice Storm) are both reading from recent and upcoming work in the cramped but congenial bar. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // KGB Bar [85 E 4th St] // Free COMEDY: Having a little American Idol withdrawl? Yeah,......

THEATER: A.R. Gurney’s new meta-play, Post Mortem, takes place in a future tyrannical America where a college student discovers a lost “masterpiece” by the largely forgotten playwright A.R. Gurney. In Post Mortem's cowardly new world, many believe Dick Cheney to be responsible for Gurney’s death, and the discovery of an unpublished memoir reveals Gurney affairs with Cameron Diaz, Katherine Hepburn and Katrina Kerns. (Okay, that last one's from our own meta-memoir.) The student’s willingness to......

READING: What do you do after you've outed Deep Throat? Well, David Friend, editor extraordinaire at Vanity Fair and general writer-about-town, has put out a new book - Watching The World Change - obervations on the post-9/11 world, and he's reading from it at the ever-popular Half King in Chelsea. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // The Half King [W 23rd St at 10th Ave] // Free TALK: Director of "Requiem for a Dream" and......

READING: Head to the NYPL for the Borowitz Report On The Future - "in a totally improvised and spontaneous program, cybersatirist Andy Borowitz will answer the audience's questions about what the future holds for current events, pop culture, sports, business, and Paris Hilton, with the guarantee that he will be at least as accurate as the New York Post," runs the NYPL description. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // Humanities and Social Sciences Library [455......

EVENT: Tonight PowerHouse books is having a signing event for the release of photographer Ron Galella's "Disco Years". This visual diary of the New York club scene in the 70's and 80's is sure to make you nostalgic for Studio 54 - even if that was before your time. 5:30 to 7pm // Rizzoli Bookstore [31 W 57th btw 5th & 6th] // Free THEATER: The workaday lives of office temps are brightened by rumors......

THEATER: Joe's Pub hosts SpeakEasy, a theatrical "event" written by Neil LaBute, Edwin Sanchez, Theresa Rebeck and many others. The performance will happen throughout the Joe's Pub space, "surrounding the spectator with the bizarre, the comic, the seductive, and the sublime. Neo-Vaudeville meets social satire in this giant play with environmental staging, original music, and compelling new writing." It's the launch of The Fire Dept. a new theater company; this show features Janeane Garafalo and......

THEATER: Get ghastly tonight with The Final Kiss & The Kiss of Blood, an evening of vintage Grand Guignol horror. The aptly named Blood Brothers are shepherding this journey “into a style of theatre that proliferated in the early 1900s and was eventually assimilated into the 'splatter' genre of horror films. Blending suspense, stage magic, eroticism, and farce, Grand Guignol was a powerful theatrical entertainment drawing an audience from every echelon of Parisian society —......

THEATER: A new multimedia opera called Violet Fire centers on legendary inventor Nikola Tesla, who not only claimed over 700 patents but also inspired basically the most wicked band ever. Part of the BAM Next Wave Festival, the show conceptualizes the inner life of the man whose famous “waking hallucinations” led to great breakthroughs in electricity (alternating current, hydroelectric power), wireless broadcasting (radio transmission), robotics (remote control), and mind-blowing guitar riffs. (Ends Saturday!) - John......

THEATER: Emergence-See! is a new one-man show in previews at the Public Theater. Conceived and performed by Daniel Beaty, the work imagines what would happen in present-day New York if, say, a slave ship were to rise out of the Hudson River in front of the Statue of Liberty. Beaty portrays 40 New York characters and uses slam poetry and song to examine the toll that centuries of slavery have taken on the human psyche.......

READING: Get a drink at the Half King tonight in some good company - Anthony Bourdain will be there with Bill Buford, to celebrate Buford's new book, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // The Half King [W 23rd St at 10th Ave] // Free THEATER: Top off your Monday with a play about two prisoners in a......

READING: The reclusive "Lemony Snicket" (known to grown-ups and non-believers as Daniel Handler) will be showing up - hopefully in a cloak and mustache disguise! - at Barnes and Noble tonight to celebrate the release of The End, the aptly-titled final chapter to his best-selling Series of Unfortunate Events. Expect the place to be rammed with excited screaming children, and maybe a suspiciously tattooed foe or two. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras Friday // 4pm //......

READING: Got some free time on a Thursday afternoon? Then head up to the 92nd Street Y at lunchtime to hear readings from former poet laureate Billy Collins and novelist Francine Prose. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 1pm // 92nd Street Y [Lexington Ave and 92nd St] // $17 THEATER:If ventriloquist dummies haunt you like Mr. Marbles, here’s a golden opportunity to overcome your fears. The promotional blurb for Jay Johnson: The Two and Only! asserts......

THEATER: Stephen Belber, whose Tape was made into a riveting film by Richard Linkater, unveils his latest opus, A Small, Melodramatic Story at The Public Theater. Previews start tonight so there are no reviews yet, but the synopsis is intriguing: “In Washington, D.C., a widow struggles to figure out whether life is worth re-engaging with. In her path are the 1968 riots, the first Gulf War, the Freedom of Information Act, and herself. There's also......

MUSIC: Doug Martsch of Built to Spill performs a stripped down acoustic set tonight before heading over to Irving to play with the band. This will be pretty amazing, so even if you missed out on tickets to the show at Irving, try to catch him solo. 5pm // Sound Fix [110 Bedford Ave, Williamsburg] // Free READINGS: At Strand tonight, Joseph Steiglitz with his new book Making Globalization Work, the sequel to Globalization and......

FILM: Going to movies can sometimes suck a lot of time and money out of you. Which is why we love film shorts. They cater to our attention span, and in this case - our wallet, too. “Made in NY Shorts,” is a whold bunch of shorts that'll leave you filled up like you'd just seen a feature length. 2:30pm // New York Public Library, Donnell Media Center [20 W 53rd St] //Free READING: Francine......

READING: KGB Bar's Non-Fiction Night is playing host to the Subway Chronicles - Boris Fishman, Elise Jurka, and Amy Holman are all reading their stories from that anthology, edited by Jaqueline Cangro. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // KGB Bar [85 E 4th St] // Free THEATER: Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime originally premiered in 1972, but in 1983 La MaMa brought it to the next level with a now-legendary rock and roll production.......

READINGS: Nostalgics from the Clinton era, unite! Head down to the 17th St. Barnes & Noble tonight to hear the dulcet (okay, maybe not) voices of Paul Begala and James Carville, together in their new book, Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future. According to the Washington Post, "the book is most convincing when it is most elitist -- a kind of 'why can't anyone play this game' attack on the Democratic Party's......

READINGS: Another double-bill this week at the 92nd Street Y - Janet Fitch (White Oleander, and her new novel, Paint it Black) and A.M. Holmes (The Safety of Objects, This Book Will Save Your Life) are reading from new work tonight, introduced respectively to the stage by Will Allison and Ben Marcus. Plus, the under-35 gets a limited number of tickets for just ten dollars. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 8pm // 92nd Street Y [E.......

READING: Tonight at 192 Books, Marisha Pessl reads from Special Topics in Calamity Physics, her buzzy and well-received first novel. Seating is usually limited at 192 Books so call (212) 255-4022 to reserve a spot. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // 192 Books [192 10th Ave. at 23rd St] // Free THEATER: Downtown writer/director/innovator Young Jean Lee kicks off the fall season at HERE with what the theater website describes as her own worst nightmare:......

THEATER: P.S. 122’s Fall Season opens tonight with the U.S. premiere of “Tower of Babel” by Dutch artists Lidy Six and Robert Steijn. Running four nights only - for only 25 audience members at a time – the event is described as “a one-of-a kind, full immersion theatre experience”. Each audience member will be personally welcomed with tea and tucked into one of twenty-five individual beds (complete with nightstands). A live VJ and DJ will......

THEATER: Mime-bashing never goes out of style, but don’t you wonder what stories an off-duty mime could tell you? In “It Goes Without Saying”, actor and mime Bill Bowers takes audiences along a hilarious and heartfelt tour from his Montana childhood (“not exactly a hotbed of mime”) to the rough and tumble life of a mime on the streets of Times Square. The 75-minute tell-all, which the Times calls “zestful and endearing”, received a “rapturous......

READINGS: A handful of good readings on the slate for you tonight - Claire Messud reads from the highly anticipated Emperor's Children at Barnes & Noble [see this upcoming weekend's Sunday review, too]; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reads from her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun at 192 Books; and finally, over at McNally Robinson NYC, political reporter Thomas Edsall reads from his new book, Building Red America: What the Conservative Realignment ­Really Means. Too......

READING: The New School's wonderful public lectures and reading series are back in swing as the school year revs up, and tonight, the ethereal Mary Gaitskill will discuss her book Veronica (a National Book Award finalist) with moderator Jeffrey Renard Allen. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 6:30pm // The New School [66 W 12th St, room 510] // $5 THEATER: The Soho Think Tank is legendary for nurturing some of the freshest new work in town.......

EVENT: Rev Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir have been unleashing their rowdy anti-corporate exorcisms at the Spiegeltent, “a wondrous 1920’s venue of billowing velvet, stained glass, teak, and a thousand mirrors.” But righteous consumers beware: The Spiegeltent is part of the South Street Seaport Mall, which is made unclean by wicked corporations like Victoria’s Secret – all the better for the Rev’s antics. He chastises the company for clear-cutting Canadian boreal forests to......

THEATER: The MoMA Dada exhibition ends Monday, and if you haven't gone yet here's even greater incentive to beat the deadline. Kate Valk, Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos of the Wooster Group are performing just three times at the museum in Who's Your DADA?!. This trio last mesmerized audiences in Emperor Jones and we're very curious to see what they do with original Dada materials. (The MoMA website tantalizingly mentions the appearance of "special guests".......

THEATER: The two most dreaded words in theater, "staged reading", get a shot at redemption with tonight's free reading of Stuff Happens. The show has cut and run from the Public Theater, so this is your last chance to catch David Hare's satire about the ramp-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. In an interview with NPR, Hare described it as "a play about how a supposedly stupid man, George W. Bush, gets everything he wants..." Laugh......