(Check out the actual chin scratching occurring, lower right, at an intelligentsia event. Har!) Here we have novelist Dave Eggers at the National Book Critics Circle nominee announcement at City Lights. We're in love with his bulky v-neck sweater. Very nice. Image credit: Flickr user Steve Rhodes.......

Prints + good tunes = the Pipettes -- The Pipettes: This all-female, British, Phil-Spector-sounding band gains more and more popularity by the day. See them tonight so that by next year when they're too big for SF venues, you can say you saw them when. They perform with Social Studies and Monster Bobby (read our interview with him here!) -- the Ladybug Transistor, who were scheduled to go on, will not be appearing -- tonight......

-- Laura Gibson: We'd hate to genre-ize her lovely sounds, but neo-folk songstress Gibson -- who uses such tools as trumpet, viola, and musical saw in addition to her sublime vocal cords-- sings delicate siren songs that will have you crashing at her feet. She performs along with Musee Mechanique (Portland) and Snowblink starting at 8 p.m. at Rickshaw Stop; $8. -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti: You know the man, the legend, the poet, the beret......

Sorry we missed this story the first time around -- the cops are still looking for the assailants in a stabbing on 19th and Castro back in June. Two gay men were walking down 19th Street when three young Hispanic men got out of a car following them. One of the young men asked them for a cigarette, and then stabbed both men repeatedly. The men managed to make it to 18th Street before one......

Who ya got? The cowboy or the samurai? That's the question posed by the Asian-American Theater Company's Cowboy v. Samurai, a story about two Asian-American cowboys in Montana who fall in love with the same Korean-American new girl in town. Our Gothamist cousins liked it when it played in New York. 2 p.m. at the Thick House (1695 18th Street, x Arkansas), $20. Other events: --The workers united -- have a whole month to celebrate!......

In artist Paul Madonna's weekly comic series All Over Coffee, San Francisco architecture—and coffee—seem to be the main characters. Beautifully technical drawings of SF scenes, combined with disembodied voices that almost feel like the city's collective consciousness, give an ethereal quality to the pieces. You can catch All Over Coffee every Sunday in the Pink section of the Chronicle, and it's archived online as well. Paul also updates his web site every Monday with a new free cartoon. This month, there are several ways you can get to know Paul and his work a little better. • Tonight from 7 to 10 pm at 312 Valencia @ 14th street, there is a Book Release Party for Paul's collection of past to present work from All Over Coffee. You can also buy the book at a discounted price from City Lights Books. ...

We're getting so upset to have to keep writing the same post over and over again -- yet another San Francisco independent bookstore is shutting its doors. This time, it's the not-so-long-ago opened Cody's SF, next to the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, who made it about a year and a half before the news today. Is that retail space cursed or what? The store's last day will be April 20, but the Cody's......

Tonight, there's music, Vivienne Westwood clothes, and film, for ten smackers? Or free if you are a museum member. Oh-la-la! Party with Viv (her work, she will be there in spirit only) at the de Young's exhibition spanning 36 years of her fashions. At 7 p.m., the film South Bank Show will screen. Corset lovers can admire and even try on some get ups created by Art Institute of SF students. de Young Museum,......

Friends of SFist, Charlie Anders (Writers with Drinks) and Annalee Newitz (whose Techsploitation column we read each week with the Weeklies) have a new anthology out called She's Such a Geek. Tonight, contributors will be reading at City Lights (261 Columbus Ave. at Broadway). The book is a collection of first-person stories by women working in tech, science, game design, and other male-dominated "geeky" fields like tech law and even comic book writing. And......

We know we're saving up our money for countless Halloween-themed events this weekend, so tonight we're all about the free stuff. Funcheap SF is an e-mail newsletter that clues in the city's under-employed, bored and frugal on the best in fun and cheap stuff to do. Tonight they're hosting the Cheap Bastard Fun Happy Hour at EZ5 Bar(682 Commercial St. at Kearny near the Holiday Inn in Chinatown). The event will feature cheap happy......

Wednesday's in a stage 2 heat emergency! Tonight: Feeling discombobulated by the big three-oh? The San Francisco Cody's is hosting the Bay Area editor and local contributors from the latest women-telling-it-to-you-straight anthology, The May Queen, featuring women in their 30s reporting about their lives today. The thirtysomething fun starts at 7 p.m. Thursday: Feeling discombobulated by the influence of market forces on horror movies? Techsploitator Annalee Newitz is reading from her new book, Pretend We're......

Amanda Boyden, author of Pretty Little Dirty is going to be reading from her book at 7 p.m. at A Clean Well-Lighted Place tonight and City Lights tomorrow. Doesn't the idea of sitting in a cozy bookstore listening to bits of a punk-influenced story of friendship sound perfect on a day like today (yes, that WAS hail)? Even if you can't make it to one of these readings, Amanda's publishers want to give the......

A couple literary events have made their way into our inbox lately, and we want to tell you about them. It's just that simple. Sometimes we like to watch people reading, it's like TV, except in our brains! Ah, City Lights, no matter how often your authentically decrepit structure causes our allergies to send us into instantaneous shock, we keep on coming back for more. Thursday night, for example, there's local author Craig Clevenger,......

Last week has left us a little exhausted. There was a lot of TV to sample, and precious little time. But we're glad to learn that the cancellation bug has begun to spread, and some of these new shows will meet the fate they, in many cases, rightly deserve, (we're talking to you, "Head Cases.") But it's not over yet: There are even more season premieres coming our way this week! But first, the......

Big ups to SFist Eve for this week's Wednesdays post title! Wednesday: Get all in the Wednesday SFist Reads mood with a cavalcade of options: Barbara Ehrenreich at Clean Well-Lighted (7:00), a Dr. Atomic discussion at City Lights (7 p.m.), Caroline Kennedy at Grace Cathedral via Books Inc. (7:30, $25 tickets at Books Inc.), Terry Pratchett at Cody's on Telegraph (7:30), and Salman Rushdie at the Herbst Theater (8:00, buy tickets here). Thursday: our biggest local purveyors of hip classical music, the Kronos Quartet, kick off the first of two shows to support their new album of Bollywood standards at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The divine Asha Bhosle will be singing, and classical Chinese pipa-ist (that's the new Gothamist site, we know it!) Wu Man will play as well. Friday: You're going to our Webzine kickoff party, right? Right? SFist's hosting Webzine 2005's kickoff party at Cafe Du Nord, from 8-10 p.m.. Everyone's invited, even if you're not going to Webzine itself. Come by, check out our cool DJs, meet your favorite staffer, and see what SFist-themed toys we can scrounge up by then! (Contrary to rumors, we will not have a cardboard picture of Chris Daly for you to take pictures with. We will have Mrs. Chris Daly shirts for sale, though! Well, maybe we'll have them for sale. Hey, can we borrow your car to drive the Mrs. Chris Daly t-shirts over to Cafe Du Nord on Friday night?) Got an event you want to tell us about? Go right ahead!...

Everyone seems to describe spoken word artist and writer/poet Beth Lisick as "fizzy" -- but she really is! City Lights was packed to the gills with Missionistas who walked up Columbus from the Montgomery BART/MUNI stop, eager to send Ms. Lisick off in style for the first stop on her book tour. City Lights generously sprung for champagne, wine, and foccacia, but we were too worried about losing our seat to actually get any. Beth Lisick's new book, Everyone into the Pool is a collection of personal essays from childhood to 16th and Mission and onto motherhood, about "turning out too weird to fit into the mainstream world... but being too normal for the fringe." So, you know, essays about diligently attempting to be bisexual, the humiliation of SuperShuttle dropping you off on a crack block, dressing up like a banana for the Fruit Guys -- you know, living in San Francisco. It got an A from Entertainment Weekly! What it was like writing The Buzz Life SFGate column, after the jump. ...

Crack den. Independent bookstore. Same thing. You're going to drop $200 at either place before you even know it. One of the mothers of all intellectual crack dens - Kepler's Bookstore - turns 50 this year. Fifty years of social consciousness (Roy Kepler was an anti-violence activist) and social unconsciousness (this is, afterall, where this SFist goes on Sundays for our European gossip rags, hidden of course behind literary journals). Kepler's, in Menlo Park,......

While we at SFist have been known to stalk around movie sets, yesterday we were actually invited by our friend to the set of the Darwin Awards, which was filming at a bar in Alameda. Directed by Finn Taylor and starring Winona Ryder and Joseph Fiennes, the movie has a multi-layered plot about a hemophobic police officer and a comely insurance adjuster. (Do they fall in love? We're not tellin'!) From what we understand, part......