This article appears in print in the September 2018 issue. Click here to subscribe.

It’s time to trade in your trashy summer novels for something with more substance; look smart at one of these Elliott Bay Book Company–produced events

9/4 Kim Brooks discusses her Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear, which explores how and why parenting became incessant child surveillance, with Seattle memoirist Claire Dederer.

9/10 Gary Shteyngart, Russian émigré and frequent New Yorker contributor, reads from his novel Lake Success, of which one critic says, “You already know it’s the funniest book you’ll read all year.”

9/16 The Internet not only distracts us, it divides us. Fight back on both fronts, says Sasquatch Books author David Ulin, who’ll speak about his new book, The Lost Art of Reading, with Paul Constant of The Seattle Review of Books.

9/21 Seattle’s Neal Bascomb tells a tale of WWI derring-do in The Escape Artists.

9/22 The University of Washington Press released a biography of John Okada, the onetime UW student whose 1956 novel, No-No Boy, revealed the bitter legacy of WWII Japanese-American internment.

Times, prices and venues vary. elliottbaybook.com