New in paperback, Spook Country (Berkley, $14) has journalist Hollis Henry arrive in L.A. to investigate locative art, an underground movement of tech-savvy artists into the mapping, annotation, and holographic reshaping of virtual space. Shes been assigned not for her journalistic chops, but because her celebrity as the former lead singer of the indie-rock band Curfew is the precise tool needed to pry access to the goal: the location of a mysterious shipping container known to Bobby Chombo, genius of the locative set (and Curfew fan). A sequel of sorts to William Gibsons 2003 bestseller Pattern Recognition, Spook Country follows a fugue-like advancement of melodies toward an oddly harmonic resolution at a port in Vancouver, B.C. Gibson illuminates our techno-psychic landscape like no one else in contemporary letters. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, www.bookstore.washington.edu. Free. 7 p.m. NATHAN LEE
Tue., June 3, 7 p.m., 2008
