>> DC Arts Commission auditions for musicians who’d like to play outside metro stations start tonight, from 5 to 8 p.m. at Metro headquarters, 600 Fifth Street, NW, Washington, DC. >> Check out our Reader, Meet Author feature for a list of cup-runneth-over literary events for tonight. There’s Colin Channer at Vertigo Books, Susan Vreeland at Phillips Collection, Christopher Hitchens at Politics and Prose, and Irvine Welsh at Wonderland. >> The Rock and Roll…

MONDAY As a part of its ongoing “Face It: We Are Probably All Going To Die or at the Very Least, Suffer Immeasurably” Series, Politics and Prose kicks off the week with a visit from Stephen Flynn, author of The Edge of Disaster, which, apparently, we are teetering on (cf. “all going to die,” “suffer immeasurably”). Also: CSI: Miami is on tonight! 5015 Connecticut Avenue, NW, 7 p.m. TUESDAY The art of letter writing is…

Written by Jason Linkins MONDAY Vertigo Books and the TransAfrica Forum’s Writers Corner are bringing three great authors together for a special reading event: Kwame Dawes (She’s Gone), Helon Habila (Measuring Time) and Dinaw Mengestu (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears) come together at the Charles Sumner School, 1201 17th Street NW, 6:30 p.m. TUESDAY It’s a father and daughter fest at Politics and Prose tonight, as John McPhee, author of Uncommon Gardens joins Martha…

MONDAY The perniciousness of apartheid, as well as its utter inanity, is well distilled in the person of Sandra Laing. While born to white parents, her darker complexion caused authorities to classify her as black at age nine, then white again at age eleven. For people too casually comfortable with discrimination, Judith Stone’s account of Laing’s life, When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race [in South Africa], is a…

MONDAY Audrey Niffenegger follows up her best-selling The Time Traveler’s Wife with another Edward Goreyian flight of fancy, The Adventuress. We bet she has one of the prettiest signatures of any author on this page. National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW., at 7 p.m. $10. Reservations: (202) 783-7370. TUESDAY Of course, Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi’s flair for visual artistry and imaginative text is on abundant display in Chicken With…