LOCAL LIT: Tired of living la vida loca after pride weekend? Sick of the sun and the heat? Want to retreat back into your dark, shade-drawn house and dream of the rain? Of course not, which is why it's so hard to recommend you spend your Monday at a literary reading. Still, local author and medical expert Carol Casella has a reading tonight down at Elliott Bay Books, for her debut novel Oxygen. Casella, a......

Tomorrow night, novelist Garth Stein (Raven Stole the Moon, How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets) and his piercing eyes are making a crosstown trek from Stein's Mount Baker home to the Elliott Bay Book Company, where Stein will read from his latest book, The Art of Racing in the Rain (6/25, 7:30 p.m.). We hear HarperCollins bought it for north of $1 million, so Stein may arrive in one of those vroomy Ferraris......

We sent special Killer Bugs correspondent Roger van Oosten to Town Hall last night to catch Richard "Hot Zone" Preston's talk. Post-decontamination, here is his report. Richard Preston, the award-winning author of The Hot Zone and Demon in the Freezer, had the Town Hall audience on his side with his very first words: “It’s freezing here! This is crazy!” Preston is on the lecture circuit pumping his new book Panic in Level 4, a collection......

BOOKS: Mary Roach enjoys "bird-watching--though the hours don't agree with me--backpacking, thrift stores, overseas supermarkets, Scrabble, mangoes, and that late-night Animal Planet show about horrific animals such as the parasitic worm that attaches itself to fishes' eyeballs but makes up for it by leading the fish around." In her book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, she discusses how and why sexual arousal and orgasm can be so elusive and what scientists......

BOOKS: Attention Chicago-watchers: NPR's Peabody-Award-winning Scott Simon is at the Moore Theatre tonight reading from his new book, Windy City: A Novel of Politics. It's a political comedy for which Simon had to come up with names for his 50 fictional Chicago aldermen; his wife named all 50 for him but he's not co-crediting her with the writing. Well, well. This is his second novel; his first is about the making of a teenage......

He's Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head brewery; she's Marnie Old, director of wine studies at the French Culinary Institute. They've teamed up to write a warm-hearted, delightful book that tweaks the boy-girl, beer-wine stereotypes without dumbing things down. The publishers are giving away free copies to the first 10 people who write and ask. Send requests to inyourglass [at] gmail.com. How did we get to this beer=populist, wine=elitist standoff, anyway? (Long post on Slate......