At the Ella Street Social Club (AKA the old Towne Lounge), the Portland Lit Offensive presents the vaguely defined Portland Aggressive, "an evening of tough love" with nine local authors. 714 SW 20th Place, 7 pm, free

Tonight at Powell's, Aleksander Hemon reads from Love and Obstacles, his new collection of linked short stories about a young Bosnian writer. I agree with Paul Constant's writeup in this week's paper—it's a very good collection. (I'd still recommend The Lazarus Project first, though.) City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, 7:30 pm, free

Also, who wants to go see Glen David Gold at Powell's tomorrow night and do a Blogtown writeup? I'm super bummed that I can't go—I strained my adjective muscle this week trying to write about how great Sunnyside is—but the reading conflicts with some play about cat ladies I have to go see. If you go, send me some thoughts; I'll edit 'em beyond all syntactical recognition and post them here. I want to know if he's really as charming and wonderful as he seems.

On a newsier note, if you've been following the interspeculation about Murakami's 1Q84, the Millions reported yesterday:

Amazon.co.jp has put up a page count, and it's a whopping 1,055 pages. While size isn't everything, it seem to be working in the book's favor; published in two volumes, it currently occupies the top two spots on Amazon Japan's book rankings. Although I've yet to find confirmation of who is doing the English translation or when it will be released, English translations of Japanese text tend to be 1.5 to 2 times longer than the source text

They also link to this post from a reader who's already snagged a copy.