Wednesday: Apples and Snakes converge on Brick Lane's Vibe Bar to bring you an all-female revue Poetry Open Mic as part of the East End's Wise Words festival (7.30pm, £3). Performers include Dzifa Benson and Kathryn O'Reilly.
Also on: Another Wise Words event, hosted at Amnesty International: Women Reporting from the Frontline features Sunday Times reporters Marie Colvin and Christine Toomey and C4 Unreported World reporter Ramita Navai (free, 7pm).
Thursday: Hip hip hooray for World Book Day. It may not be a bank holiday - yet - but surely your boss won't raise an eyebrow when you cite religious reasons as the basis for your truancy? Among the day's events worth playing hooky for: Barbican Library hosts a costume quiz, as staff dress up as their favourite literary characters and you, dear reader, get the chance to win prizes simply for guessing who they are (11am-5.30pm, free). Iain Sinclair - who will be making the rounds in the upcoming weeks now that Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire has hit the bookshelves - will be at Museum in Docklands for Word Up @ Late (6pm, tickets available first come, first serve; call 020 7001 9844). Head over to Oxfam Marylebone for the pleasure of listening to 14 young British poets, including Joe Dunthorne, Isobel Dixon, Luke Kennard, Daljit Nagra and Kathryn Simmonds, at the Manhattan Review launch (7pm, free; call 020 7487 3570 or email [email protected] to reserve a ticket). Or, for the unencumbered among us, cap off your evening with like-minded singles at the British Library's Mingle event (7pm, £5). Speed Book Club, the library's hybrid of speed dating and book swap, tantalises with its promise of new-found romance and new-found literature - and, well, one out of two isn't bad.
Saturday: The nearly three-week-long London Word Festival kicks off with the first of its events this evening, and as with so much of the festival's lineup, this event defies easy categorisation. If 'live folk ballad printing experiment' still doesn't clarify matters for you, perhaps you better turn up for yourself to listen as folk artists Mary Hampton, Caroline Weeks and John Bilbrough explore the boundaries of the ballad and the broadsheet (7.30pm, £6.50).
Also on: What? That's not enough, you self-punishing über-intellectual, you? Then stop in at Housmans for its screening of the the British premiere of Chomsky and Company, a French documentarians' critical look at Noam Chomsky's political thought (5.30pm).
Sunday: The London Word Festival moves on to its next exercise in cross-genre experimentation - tonight it's the contemporary folk-extremism of the Southbank Award-nominated singer Bishi and singer-songwriter Lupen Crook at Bardens Boudoir (7pm, £7.50) in an all-acoustic set. Want a preview? Head here and here.
Monday: Words on Monday at Kings Place brings us The Nature Darwin Debate 2: What price biodiversity?, curated by Nature and featuring Revenge of Gaia author and scientist James Lovelock, MP Michael Meacher and Oxford University's Sir Crispin Tickell (7pm, £9.50).
Also on: The London Word Festival hosts An Evening with Phil Jupitus and Tim Wells at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, with appearances by Barry Adamson, Amy Prior and Travis Elborough (8pm, £8). We'd explain it if we could, but why, when they do it better.
Tuesday: Novelist and Pride and Prejudice screenplay (and BAFTA nominated) writer Deborah Moggach comes to Foyles to discuss the challenges of Adapting Anne Frank for the recent BBC dramatisation (6.30pm, £5 PEN members, £8 nonmembers).
Know of an event that belongs in the Book Grocer listings? Please e-mail us at londonist-at-gmail-dot-com.
