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Super-cool literary events: San Francisco, NYC

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Hear Cory Doctorow and Rudy Rucker read Monday night -- if you’re in San Francisco -- at a benefit for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They’ll be joined by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, both of science fiction site io9.

Doctorow, one of the editors of BoingBoing, is the author of ‘Little Brother,’ which has garnered accolades from just about everybody -- Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus -- and is now up for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Rudy Rucker has never won a Hugo, but William Gibson said ‘Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American science fiction.’ Rucker has written 30 books, and won the Philip K. Dick Award -- twice.

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I don’t know what Annalee Newitz or Charlie Jane Anders might read, but io9 is smart and funny and far more literary than most science fiction sites. Newitz, who’s written for Wired and Popular Science, is the site’s editor; Anders writes posts like ‘11 Books About People Whose Childhoods Were Worse Than Yours’ and ‘Star Trek’s Future San Francisco Would Never Get Past the Board of Supervisors.’ Anders also hosts the reading series Writers with Drinks.

Also on Monday night, way across the country, writers will be drinking (OK, probably all across the country). But I mean specifically in New York, in Manhattan, at Dixon Place, to raise money for Slice Magazine. The occasion is Slice’s first-ever Literary Trivia Showdown.

Three teams will face off: one of authors, one of agents and one of editors. The authors are the stars -- Jonathan Lethem, Chip Kidd, A.J. Jacobs, Darin Strauss and Susan Jane Gilman. But the agents may be what sells tickets -- everybody who’s working on a book wants to meet an agent. The editors are people who work hard but rarely get the spotlight -- maybe they’ll turn that around on Monday.

Tickets for both events are $25 -- in San Francisco, they won’t turn you away if you have less, and in New York, you get free beer and snacks. Slice Magazine’s editors gave us another freebie, too: a teaser literary trivia question.

Q. Who jokingly responded to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that the rich are different from us with, ‘Yes, they have more money’?

The answer is after the jump.

A. Ernest Hemingway.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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