BASTILLE DAY AT THE MARKET: Seattle's French restaurants are in Francophile overdrive tonight in celebration of French independence. Le Pichet (1933 First Ave.) starts its annual party at 6 p.m. and features Gypsy jazz until 11 p.m., when the d.j. takes over. Maximilien (81A Pike St.) has a special three-course dinner tonight for $35 and an accordion player. And Cafe Campagne (86 Pine St.) tops them all: a street fair is happening in Post Alley starting at 3 p.m. including wine and hors d'oeuvres. For those seeking more sustenance, they're offering an extravagant five-course dinner for around $80 per person. more ›

TO TELL THE TRUTH: We in the Seattlest newsroom love a good controversy. When it involves a literary sensation and Oprah, the intrigue is doubly delicious. So you can bet that number one on our list of things to do tonight is go to Town Hall to see James Frey and Josh Kilmer-Purcell for a night of readings from two "memorists turned novelists." Frey admitted on Oprah that what he wrote about getting over his drug addiction was a lot of lies. Maybe his novel will turn out to be true? more ›

Barack Obama has hope, but Mike Daisey has the audacity to sit down just one hour prior to his one-man show, Stories from an Atlantic Night Café, and write an outline that will be his only guide when he steps on stage. Seattlest chatted with Daisey via e-mail as he made the cross-country trek from his home in Brooklyn to Seattle prior to his performance at CHAC on Sunday night. more ›

Back in October we posted about not being able to get our grubby little eyes on Jonathan Raban's new novel until January. The month has come and, now, gone, and the book is available at all your favorite retail outlets - Tonight Jonathan's reading from it at Queen Anne Books. If you've never heard Jonathan Raban speak you're nearly as impoverished as if you'd never read any of his books. He seems to write out loud like he just can't turn it off. He can't stop this volume and density of ideas and observations from flowing out of himself, and then there's a way about his voice that's so conspiratorial, so peculiarly British, so charmingly agile in tone and inflection that... Uhm, we're fans. more ›

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That guy that's usually tapping at his laptop and gazing off into the middle distance at the cafe has suddenly disappeared. He's at home furiously typing his tell-all memoir: "The world knew me as a female refugee from the Phillipines who escaped a life of political oppression, violence, prostitution and drugs but now I must reveal myself as a midwestern white boy who lied about it all to sell a few books. The ironic thing is, none of the fake pain I was writing about can compare to the actual devastation of living with this lie for the past ten years." more ›

Seattlest is home sick this afternoon. Bad. But, happily, we're able to watch disgraced "memoirist" James Frey lick Oprah's boots on KING 5. She's decided that she was wrong to defend him and confronts him directly about his apparently fictional A Million Little Pieces, live. She also brings on the book's editor, literary celebrity Nan Talese, who comes off as a total phony. She says that an "author's note" will explain what Frey made up, and what he didn't. more ›

The American Lung Association recently released their "State of Tobacco Control" report cards and Washington did a lot of work buffing up our transcript. "A"s in Smoke Free Air and Cigarette Tax, a "B" in Tobacco Prevention and Control Spending and an unfortunate "C" in Youth Access. All in all it's not a report card we'll have to hide from mom until we can forge the "F"s into "B"s like we had to in grade school. As an aside, why can't "F"s be easily forged into maybe "C"s? "B"s? C'mon, it strains credulity that a note we failed to intercept at the mailbox mid-semester indicated a low failing grade in English, but, miraculously, we were able to elevate ourselves to a "B" by the time grades are given. A "B" is praiseworthy in some instances. Do you know what it does to a child to get praised for a "B" that was actually an "F"? It isn't pretty. Twenty years and thousands of hours in group have failed to break our praise/guilt association. more ›