Can't Miss It: Monday

BOOKS: Though one of Joshua Ferris's ad-man protagonists claims to be writing a "small and angry" book about his work, the New York Times calls Ferris's And Then We Came to the End "expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny." He's reading from his dot-com-era novel at Elliott Bay. It centers around the layoff-paranoid employees of an ad agency, who have been contracted to create a breast cancer awareness campaign that will make women laugh in the face of the disease.

7:30pm // Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St // FREE

FILM: The U-District's tiny Grand Illusion is showing Funky Forest: The First Contact, the Northwest premiere of the film by Katsuhito Ishii. Its unlikely heroes are an "unlucky-in-love Guitar Brother, his compulsively dancing older sibling, and their younger relative, a chubby Caucasian addicted to junk food." It comes with 21 free-associative episodes and a plot keyword is "flatulence."

PHOTOGRAPHY: It's the last week of "What's Not to Love?" at Photographic Center Northwest, if you haven't seen it yet. Rachel Herman, Molly Landreth, and Jenny Riffle are exhibited, with perspectives on ex-lovers, queer identity, and emotional space. For some reason, photographers are taught to write about their work with a blizzard of academic buzzwords: "Embodiment is about love and the process of growing into ones self and the complexity of relationships found between diverse groups of people." But the pictures look good, honest. (Photo © 2006 Rachel Herman: Wanda and Ian.)

noon-9pm // Photographic Center Northwest, 900 12th Ave // FREE

The listed events were chosen by the editors of Seattlest and brought to you by the 2009 Toyota Corolla.