Author John Updike was at Seattle Arts & Lectures this week. The upcoming SAL appearance of Annie Leibovitz (November 19) is sold out. Michael Pollan (January 12) is almost sold out. Courtly, thin John Updike has lived long enough that he has now to spend interviews responding to years- and decades-old quotes as if he’s just said them. "I said that?" he asked once, not, we felt, entirely jokingly. On the other hand, he’s still......

The author of Empire Falls (Pulitzer Prize), Nobody's Fool and Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo came to Benaroya Hall last night for a Seattle Arts & Lectures talk about, of all things, humor. He writes without a trace of condescension about life in small towns, about the gap between rich and poor, about the pleasures some people take in cruelty. Often his work seems dark, but in fact--he told the audience of big-city sophisticates--he thinks......

TRASH TALKING: Not totally through with film after SIFF? Tonight, trash cinema provocateur John Waters appears at Seattle Arts & Lectures. From groundbreaking indie work like Pink Flamingos to cult classics like Hairspray to contemporary satire like Pecker and Cecil B. Demented, Waters has been pushing the boundaries of the cinema for about 40 years, and has moved from the indie fringes to the mainstream with popular stage musicals of his classic films. 7:30 p.m.......

In preparation for his upcoming visit, Seattlest sat down and emailed four fairly inane questions to the novelist, essayist, and MacArthur genius Colson Whitehead. It's true: we could have tried asking Whitehead insightful questions about his brilliant novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, and Apex Hides the Hurt, but we figured, everyone tries to do that and he winds up getting asked them same question over and over again. So instead, we asked him about......