BASTILLE DAY AT THE MARKET: Seattle's French restaurants are in Francophile overdrive tonight in celebration of French independence. Le Pichet (1933 First Ave.) starts its annual party at 6 p.m. and features Gypsy jazz until 11 p.m., when the d.j. takes over. Maximilien (81A Pike St.) has a special three-course dinner tonight for $35 and an accordion player. And Cafe Campagne (86 Pine St.) tops them all: a street fair is happening in Post Alley......

TO TELL THE TRUTH: We in the Seattlest newsroom love a good controversy. When it involves a literary sensation and Oprah, the intrigue is doubly delicious. So you can bet that number one on our list of things to do tonight is go to Town Hall to see James Frey and Josh Kilmer-Purcell for a night of readings from two "memorists turned novelists." Frey admitted on Oprah that what he wrote about getting over his......

Barack Obama has hope, but Mike Daisey has the audacity to sit down just one hour prior to his one-man show, Stories from an Atlantic Night Café, and write an outline that will be his only guide when he steps on stage. Seattlest chatted with Daisey via e-mail as he made the cross-country trek from his home in Brooklyn to Seattle prior to his performance at CHAC on Sunday night. One hour before the show?......

Back in October we posted about not being able to get our grubby little eyes on Jonathan Raban's new novel until January. The month has come and, now, gone, and the book is available at all your favorite retail outlets - Tonight Jonathan's reading from it at Queen Anne Books. If you've never heard Jonathan Raban speak you're nearly as impoverished as if you'd never read any of his books. He seems to write out......

[See the end of this post for contest information. Win a shirt!] On April 7th, Asia Argento's film "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" based on JT LeRoy's collection of short stories will open at the Varsity. Asia Argento may look familiar to American audiences--she has played roles in xXx and Land of the Dead and can be seen in Sofia Coppola's upcoming Marie-Antoinette. It seems like a disparate and sparse list of films,......

That guy that's usually tapping at his laptop and gazing off into the middle distance at the cafe has suddenly disappeared. He's at home furiously typing his tell-all memoir: "The world knew me as a female refugee from the Phillipines who escaped a life of political oppression, violence, prostitution and drugs but now I must reveal myself as a midwestern white boy who lied about it all to sell a few books. The ironic thing......

Seattlest is home sick this afternoon. Bad. But, happily, we're able to watch disgraced "memoirist" James Frey lick Oprah's boots on KING 5. She's decided that she was wrong to defend him and confronts him directly about his apparently fictional A Million Little Pieces, live. She also brings on the book's editor, literary celebrity Nan Talese, who comes off as a total phony. She says that an "author's note" will explain what Frey made up,......

The American Lung Association recently released their "State of Tobacco Control" report cards and Washington did a lot of work buffing up our transcript. "A"s in Smoke Free Air and Cigarette Tax, a "B" in Tobacco Prevention and Control Spending and an unfortunate "C" in Youth Access. All in all it's not a report card we'll have to hide from mom until we can forge the "F"s into "B"s like we had to in grade......