A midnight book release? Only for Harry Potter and celebrated Seattle author Sherman Alexie. The party starts tonight at 10 at Elliott Bay Book Company with live music and fry bread from Off the Rez food truck, followed by Alexie reading from his latest collection of short stories, Blasphemy, at 11. He'll start signing books just 'round midnight.

Blasphemy is something of a crash course in Alexie, with 15 of his best-known short works alongside 16 all-new pieces. As Brian Colella writes in Seattle Met's October issue: "Alcoholism, drug abuse, poverty, aimlessness, and death—always death—weigh heavily on the characters in Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories (Grove/Atlantic, October 2)... Shuffled in with the classics—'The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,' 'The Toughest Indian in the World'—are 16 new tales. Together they reveal the Seattle writer’s mastery of powerful sentences and penchant for infusing his yarns with autobiography: infantile hydrocephalus features in 'War Dances,' high-school basketball stardom in 'Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church,' and the existential quandary of an Indian removed from the reservation in almost every story. But because this is Sherman Alexie, all that misery is tempered with sardonic—if fatalistic—humor. 'Why should we organize a reservation high school reunion?' one character asks. 'My graduating class has a reunion every weekend at the Powwow Tavern.'"

Sherman Alexie
Oct 1 (into Oct 2), 10pm, Elliott Bay Book Co, free