Book It: The Five Best Literary Events This Week

If you’d rather consider anything other than what kind of stuffing you should make, whether cranberry sauce is better straight from the can or concocted in some sort of overthought Martha Stewart way, or, God help us, what to do with all this leftover turkey, literature is here to help.

Here are your five best literary bets for Thanksgiving week in Denver – stuff for which we can truly be grateful.

Active Minds Lecture: Climate Change
Tuesday, November 26, 7 p.m.
Tattered Cover
2526 East Colfax Avenue
Free
Join Active Minds and others in the community who want to consider and discuss the issue of climate change. It’s one of the greatest threats facing humanity, especially in this political era. For more information on this ongoing lecture series, visit the Active Minds website.

Coffeetalk Storytime
Friday, November 30, 10 a.m.
BookBar
4280 Tennyson Street
Free
If you’re tired of turkey and don’t want to brave the maddening crowds of Black Friday, head over to BookBar for its traditional Friday storytime, chock-full of literary calm. Half off all cafe beverages for parents, cookies for the kids, and storytelling for everyone. It’s the perfect wind-down from the hectic holidays…which, really, are just getting started. For now, come out and relax.

Lisa Brown Roberts, The Book Worm Crush
Sunday, December 1, 2 p.m.
Tattered Cover Aspen Grove
7301 South Santa Fe Drive, Littleton
Free
Lisa Brown Roberts, author of Spies, Lies, and Allies: A Love Story, brings her new novel, The Book Worm Crush, to the Tattered Cover Aspen Grove for a reading and signing. The YA book is a spin-off, as you might gather from the title, of Roberts’s popular The Replacement Crush. The event is free and open to the public – and a great way to get your own bookworm teens out of the house for a good literary reason.

Denver Horror Collective, Terror at 5280′
Sunday, December 1, 6 p.m.
BookBar
4280 Tennyson Street
Free
Colorado’s own Denver Horror Collective debuts its first unsettling anthology of locally produced, locally based scary short stories with this reading, signing and fearsome-fun launch party. It’s 22 tales of terror set in Denver and the surrounding Front Range, all from local authors who know all too well the seedy, creeping, hair-raising dread of living at a mile high. Come out and support your local authors. Hollie Snider hosts this petrifying party, with many of the authors in attendance.

JP Gritton, Wyoming
Monday, December 2, 7 p.m.
Tattered Cover
2526 East Colfax Avenue
Free
Duke University English professor JP Gritton brings his new novel, Wyoming, to the Tattered Cover for a reading and signing. The book, described as a “cross between Daniel Woodrell and Annie Proulx,” focuses on a down-and-out guy in 1988 who’s lost everything – except fifty pounds of high-grade marijuana, which he needs to get from Colorado to Texas. Is redemption possible in a world that grants forgiveness grudgingly, if at all? That’s the question in this tale of one character navigating the late-twentieth-century American West.

Have a literary event you think should be included on this list? Send details to editorial@westword.com.