The monthly Inside Story Time literary reading is this Thursday, featuring Julia Flynn Siler (The House of Mondavi), Ron Saxen (The Good Eater), Andy Raskin (The Ramen King and I), Thy Tran (Wandering Spoon), and Cameron Heffernan (Cooking with Harvey).

I’ll be interviewing author Stephen Elliott later this week, but you should know he’s starting a new monthly series of the Progressive Reading Series, which benefits progressive political candidates, and the first one is this coming Saturday, featuring the jaw-droppingly good Tobias Wolff.

Here’s the schedule for the year.

Anybody who had anything to do with San Francisco’s Cleis Press* in the last few years will remember the delightful Diane Levinson, who coordinated events for their authors and ran marketing. MediaBistro’s GalleyCat caught up with her today — she’s back in New York, working for a music and music-related book publisher, Hal Leonard.

Last week the National Book Critics Circle organization was in town to announce the finalists for their annual awards. I attended one of the panels they pulled together, this one about “new voices.” One of the recommended author’s names I recognized was that of Anne-E. Wood (don’t misplace the hyphen), whose lovely book of short stories Two if by Sea I enjoyed a lot.

One of the panelists, the very lovely Suzanne Kleid, blogs on literature for KQED, and in this post discusses the state of things.

* Disclosure: Cleis is the publisher of my two books and a forthcoming novel.

Related posts:

1. Book critics to meet in SF
2. Book critics coming to town
3. The literary scene
4. Literary Noir Night at Mechanics Library
5. Queer literary events