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......

What? What'd we say? We just heard that Starbucks has chosen a book by Seattle novelist Garth Stein to distribute wherever its grande americanos are sold. Titled The Art of Racing in the Rain, the novel has also won the hearts and minds of U.S. independent booksellers, who have made it their No. 1 Booksense recommendation for June. See, the story's narrator is a dog named Enzo (an idea Stein lifted from a Billy Collins......

BURLESQUE BENEFIT: Jet City Burlesque appears at the Columbia City Theatre in a benefit for animals in animal shelters. You're supposed to bring dog and cat "items" to the show, to help the shelter experience seem less like prison. Join the Swedish Housewife and the Shanghai Pearl, among many other luminaries, for a warm-hearted celebration of the slightly indecent and intoxicatingly indecorous. And don't forget the squeaky toy. For the animals. 7 p.m. doors,......