That WRITELondon lady, poet and creative writery type, Jasmine Cooray, is appearing alongside a whole host of female performers at the launch of The Hothouse tonight, at The Cross Kings, York Way N1. It's a spoken word fundraiser - just a round £5 entry - in aid of inspiredwordarts.com between 7.30 and 11pm.......

Head to the Southbank Centre for the London Literature Festival Fresh Off the Page series. Tonight’s event, These Streets Sound Like LDN City, showcases the talents of several young spoken word artists and musicians and is put together by young curators from the SOWF Street Genius programme under the mentorship of Southbank Centre Emerging Artist in Residence Yemisi Blake. Definitely worth checking out. Front room of Queen Elizabeth Hall, 7.30pm, free.......

Festival season embeds itself in our social life this week and makes a mockery of our diary – it’s all illegible scribblings, strike-throughs, and exclamation points. Whilst we attempt to sort ourselves out, let’s see what sense we can make of the week ahead in literary London for you... Monday: Bebop hep-cats (that’s right, hep-cats) converge on the Troubadour tonight to celebrate the 1950s poetry scene (8pm, £6/£5 concessions); biographers Anne Sebba and Andrew......

Mwhahaha. The Book Grocer rubs her hands together greedily as she contemplates the week ahead. Festival season kicks off this week, and its offerings may be summarised with one word: excellent. Tuesday: VS Naipaul fans will want to head to Daunt Books tonight to hear Patrick French and AN Wilson discuss French’s recent biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author, The World Is What It Is, heralded as a “magnificent achievement” (7pm, £5). Also on:......

Diaries out, bibliophiles. Festival season is almost upon us. No, not the festival season that will have you rolling around in mud or throwing your pants at the stage (well, you could throw your pants at the stage, and we’d certainly provide moral support for that endeavour). We’re talking literary festival season – Christmas in July for the book geeks among us. Let’s start with the little guy first. London Lit Plus launched just......

June’s here, and we’re feeling a bit slack. But although the summer blockbusters have rolled into town to lessen the load on our addled brains, literary London keeps on cranking out the heavyweights. Lightweight summer reading? Not here, not yet. Tuesday: You might have inferred that we love London. We do, we really do. Which places us in the company of many a great poet: Wordsworth, Blake, Lawrence. Poems by these and plenty of......

2007 is quickly slipping away, and with it the few remaining book events for the year. As most of us are busy buying books for the bibliophiles on our shopping lists rather than reading or going to signings this week, we thought we’d present you with an alternative Book Grocer today. For those of you already finished with your shopping (you overachievers you), the traditional listings follow. If, like Londonist, you go for the......

Just out the Van: Don't forget Bookslam tonight with guests including Mr. Irvene Welsh. There aren't any more advance tickets but there should be plenty on the door. Go early to avoid disappointment. Leave early to avoid hangover. Just kidding. 6.30pm, until late, £6, Book Slam @ Neighbourhood, 12 Acklam Road, W10 5QZ, food available. Givin’ ‘em away: Quite a hefty topic for midweek is John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death......

If you could release a spoken word album of cabbie stories you would have to advertise it in a K-Tel Hit Parade LP style. It would sound something like this: New from K-Tel, it’s the 100 best Cabbie stories coming to all good record stores! Who could forget such classics as; “You’ll never guess who I had in the back of my cab the other day…” Or the mercurial: “The trouble with Blair is......

Just out the Van: Penned in the Margins is an evening of "music-cum-literary delights" this Thursday, featuring spoken word artist Ventriloquist, Bristol-based SJ Esau, Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip and Tim Wells. Spitz, 109 Commercial Street, E1 6BG, 020 7392 9032. In Next Week: Tarquin Hall (Salaam Brick Lane), Melanie McGrath (Silvertown), and Will Self (The Book of Dave) discuss the wealth of stories to be found in London’s East End, especially, in......

We've all considered it at some point in our lives: we are tired of being ruled by our possessions... we wish we could live less material lives... wouldn't it be great to just chuck it all in and live in a fridge with nothing but our wits and wiles. The "self-proclaimed architect" Mr Sole Abode does it exactly that. This odd character decides he has had enough of life ruled by material possesions so......

Who would have thought it, but hey look! The London International Mime Festival is back - for the 29th time. Mime is perhaps the wrong word for what looks like a very experimental festival - there is a distinct lack of white painted faces, gloves and gurning faces pretending to be trapped behind invisible glass doors. It seems to be more about theatre without words which means anything from puppets to trapezes to naked......

Every era has it poets, so if you are still stuck with Wordsworth, Sassoon and Keats as your only frames of reference for just the price of a pint you can gain access to London’s poetry circuit and soak up some modern day verse. A good place to sample spoken word is at London’s very own Poetry Café in Covent Garden where Poetry Unplugged takes over the café’s tiny basement every Tuesday evening. This......

It's the first Friday of the the month which means Tate Britain is hosting another Late at Tate event. From 7.30pm tonight, if you're not in the pub or avoiding a club, there'll be free music and stuff to see and enjoy. The musical part of the evening is called Black Drum and features Arthur Brick, a three piece who sing songs about Bermondsey war veterans, night buses to Catford, 1950's homosexuals and religious......

Henry Rollins will be rolling into town again next month for one of his annual spoken word gigs - at least we hope he will, because whether he gets here may well be down to what reading material he decides to bring with him. His choice of in-flight read caused a ridiculous kafuffle when he recently travelled from New Zealand to Australia. It turns out that a fellow passenger objected to Rollins reading Ahmed......

Since we down here in the dungeon are absolutely convinced that your New Year's resolutions are all going to be to see more live music in 2006 we've kindly decided to drop you a list of some of the shows we'd like to see you at (that you can at least still get tickets for): Electric Eel Shock - Underworld, Wednesday 1st February Dragonforce - Astoria, Friday 3rd February Kano - Astoria, Saturday 4th......

Dreams That Money Can Buy is a brand new journal of contemporary art, poetry, prose and political satire. In fact you may already have seen it as their first issue came out in March. So why are we telling you about it now? Well, this Saturday DMCB's publishers have organised an evening of spoken word performances to celebrate their debut publication and the lineup is pretty intriguing. Sophie Woolley (pictured) is one of London's......