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Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar this week.

To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

Two famed authors, Martin Amis and Jeffrey Eugenides, will headline an evening of “Selected Shorts” readings. Hear them on Wednesday, February 25th at Symphony Space starting 7:30 p.m. (New York, NY)

Chef Angelo Sosa and radio personality Angie Martinez will sit for a discussion about their new cookbook. See them on Thursday, February 26th at Barnes & Noble (Tribeca) starting 6 p.m. (New York, NY)

Three young adult writers, Gayle Forman, E. Lockhart, and Libba Bray, will come together for a launch party. Join in on Friday, February 27th at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

Chipotle Mexican Grill has recruited ten new writers to contribute pieces for its “Cultivating Thought” line.

Jonathan Safran Foer returns to serve as both curator and editor. The participants include Neil Gaiman, Aziz Ansari, Augusten Burroughs, Walter Isaacson, Amy Tan, Paulo Coelho, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Barbara Kingsolver, Julia Alverez and Jeffrey Eugenides. The company’s cups and bags will feature short stories and illustrations.

Gaiman announced on his Facebook page that his piece focuses on “refugees and the fragility of the world.” Here’s an excerpt: “There are now fifty million refugees in the world today, more than at any time since the end of the Second World War. And at some point, for each one of those people, the world shifted. Their world, solid and predictable, erupted or dissolved into chaos or danger or pain. They realized that they had to run. You have two minutes to pack. You can only take what you can carry easily.” Follow this link to learn more. (via The Hollywood Reporter)

BBC Culture conducted a critics’ poll to select the “21st Century’s 12 greatest novels.” Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao captured the top spot.

The participating critics reviewed 156 books for this venture. Most of them named Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book as their number one pick.

The other eleven titles that made it include Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, and The Known World by Edward P. Jones. Did one of your favorites make it onto the list? (via The Guardian)

At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels? Looking for a guide that will best demonstrate how to knit argyle socks? Need a book for [...]

Addressing the ubiquitous love triangle, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is a perfectly executed character study of three college students — Leonard, Madeleine, and Mitchell — who variously are a couple, are not a couple, were a couple, were never a couple, or were almost a couple. Ah, young love! However, absolutely nothing Eugenides writes is [...]

Readers looking for literary-centric web videos can turn to LiveWriters.com. The site showcases videos spotlighting on authors and books of every genre.

Browsers can find everything from book trailers to recorded interviews. The site’s most recent videos features Chuck Palahniuk reading from Knock, Knock, Paul Zak discussing the origins of morality and Jeffrey Eugenides talking about his latest title The Marriage Plot.

Here’s more from the site description: “LiveWriters is home to video and audio by and about writers of all types and kinds, as well as news, stories, original writing – in short anything that matters to writers, writing and the future of our shared culture. And we believe in a good healthy dose of fun too. Participate, play, share, enjoy.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The National Book Award finalists were unveiled yesterday and many readers instantly started drawing lists of influential authors who didn’t make the list. Over at Salon, Laura Miller took the most dramatic stance in her essay “How the National Book Awards made themselves irrelevant.”

She cited four popular novels that the judges passed over: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and The Submission by Amy Waldman.

Here’s more from the essay: “the National Book Award in fiction, more than any other American literary prize, illustrates the ever-broadening cultural gap between the literary community and the reading public. The former believes that everyone reads as much as they do and that they still have the authority to shape readers’ tastes, while the latter increasingly suspects that it’s being served the literary equivalent of spinach. Like the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, awarded by librarians, the NBA has come to indicate a book that somebody else thinks you ought to read, whether you like it or not.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

There are few things more gratifying than successful literary novelists. I myself can't get enough of their stories, their confessions.

It is a lovely thing, therefore, to watch Jeffrey Eugenides in conversation with Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times—to hear what this multi-platinum author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex has to say about the work that he has done over the years and the city, Detroit, that has fueled his imagination.

I was intrigued, especially, by the way Eugenides has determinedly evolved his own work—moving, as he says, from a "preoccupation with language" (The Virgin Suicides) toward a focus on plotting (Middlesex) toward what he describes as an emphasis on deeper characterization and psychological portraiture—the "deepening realism" that marks his current work. I loved his overt commitment not just to changing form, but to raising the stakes.

At the moment I am deeply engaged in the early research and writing of a novel for adults. It's not as if I have not tried to write novels for adults in the past; I have written many that have failed. I wasn't ready. I needed to take the cross-wise steps that years spent writing memoir, poetry, history, fable, criticism, and young adult novels ultimately yielded. To learn to trust language, in memoir. To learn to break it apart, in poetry. To pursue the almost impossible detail through historical research. To tell a story through YA novels. To bend a story, through fable. To sustain a certain vulnerability through the blog. Having never taken a writing course (as an adult, I attended three summer workshops), I have had to teach myself to write, and the road that I've traveled has often stumped out, looped back, and confused.

But it has also brought me here. It has given me both foundation and framework. Tools with which to work against an idea I can't quite yet contain.