They call them the dog days of summer. But we hope it won't insult any of the dogs of your acquaintance if we tell you our August readers are no pack of dogs. Au contraire! In the spirit of the season, Tuesday Funk will bring the hottest writers in town together at Hopleaf, including Tegan Jones, Sondra Morin, Eden M. Robins, Julie Rosenthal, Jerry Schwartz and Karen Skalitzky. Good thing there's so much great beer available—dozens of varieties of it—because you'll need it to cool down before, during, and after.

Tuesday Funk convenes Tuesday, August 2, 2011, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark St., Chicago. Arrive early, stake out a table in the upper room, and grab a beer from John at the cash-only bar. We start seating at 7:00 pm and no earlier. Admission is always free, but you must be 21 or older. And come early or stay afterward for some great Belgian-style food downstairs.

Please bring plenty of friends, and become a fan of Tuesday Funk on Facebook so you never miss an invitation to our readings, which this fall will feature an amazing array of writers you won't want to miss. Ruff!

And as you await our August event, please enjoy this short preview, taken from our February reading, of the work of Eden Robins...

As we count down to our August reading, we're bringing you some classic performances from Tuesday Funks past. In this clip from May, Paul McComas channels his character Aldo Vesper to bring us a real big fish story. (Or is that reel?)

Your friends here at Tuesday Funk are taking it easy during the month of July, so we thought we'd fill in that giant Funk-shaped hole in your heart with some more video performances from the archives.

Back in May, we were fortunate enough to have Mr. Paul McComas grace our podium, and when he visited it looked a little something like this...

If you missed our Science Fiction Sextuple Feature this past Tuesday night, you missed a brisk, funny, and exciting evening with some of today's upcoming and best writers of speculative fiction. That's right, we were joined upstairs at Hopleaf by the members of the Wellspring Workshop, who took a break from an intense week of critiquing novels to read for us and our excellent audience.

Kelly Swails kicked things off with a tantalizing excerpt from her time-travel story "A Portrait in Time." Gregory A. Wilson thrilled us with the creatures in his novel-in-progress Icarus (featured in the video below). Vincent Jorgensen showed us a near future dominated by internet search giant Pood!e. And Holly McDowell moved us with an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Farah Minor.

After a break to let our audience visit John at the bar, co-host William Shunn read his poem "The Lunar Night, Chicago." Sarah K. Castle brought us terrifyingly face-to-face with "The Mutant Stag at Horn Creek." And Brenda Cooper—after giving away a copy of Year's Best SF 16 to one of the non-SF readers in our audience—showed us what happens when a young girl in a post-apocalypse Pacific Northwest no longer wants to remain "In Their Garden."

In short, it was the kind of quality evening you've come to expect from Tuesday Funk. We're taking the month of July off, but please join us next on August 2nd for an evening with Tegan Jones, Sondra Morin, Eden M. Robins, Julie Rosenthal, Jerry Schwartz and Karen Skalitzky. You won't want to miss it!

Happy Summer Solstice, in honor of which your friends here at the Funk are staging an alien invasion tonight in Chicago! Well, at any rate, a group of fantastic out-of-town writers from around the country will be converging on Hopleaf for a phantasmagorical edition of Tuesday Funk. That's the monthly Chicago reading series where good writing and good beer mix, and where this evening we're celebrating our 35th stellar episode with a very special Science Fiction Sextuple Feature.

Our amazing guests—on loan from the Wellspring Workshop in Lake Geneva, WI—will include Brenda Cooper, Sarah K. Castle, Holly McDowell, Gregory A. Wilson, Vincent Jorgensen, and Kelly Swails. We'll also throw in one of our patented Poems By Bill for no extra charge. Hey, the show's free anyway, so it's no skin off our proboscides! We hope you'll avail yourself of a beer or three at the bar—but only if you're not piloting a car or a spaceship home afterward.

So let your geek flag fly, set your phasers on fun, and join us tonight for six terrific journeys to the ends of space and time!

Oh, one more thing, and please pay attention! Show up at Tuesday Funk tonight to learn how you can attend a very exclusive advance screening of ATTACK THE BLOCK, the latest movie from the producers of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, taking place in Chicago on Thursday, June 23. You won't want to miss this story of a London street gang defending their council estate from alien invaders. So be there at Hopleaf, or "like" us today on Facebook, and we'll get you the skinny on this acclaimed U.K. flick. See you tonight!

Hopleaf is at 5148 N. Clark St. in Chicago. The reading begins at 7:30 pm in the upstairs lounge. The lounge opens at 7:00 pm. Arrive early for a seat!

As always, the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf is cash-only and 21 and over. Remember also that no food can be brought in from the restaurant.

We're so excited about our upcoming "Science Fiction Sextuple Feature" that we want to put you in the mood with yet another video scavenged from a recent Tuesday Funk episode. When Tim W. Brown joined us at our podium back in May, he brought us an excerpt from his latest novel, the time-travel adventure Second Acts, and it sounded a little something like this...

Please join us on Tuesday, June 21st, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm, for more great tales of fantasy and science fiction by Brenda Cooper, Sarah K. Castle, Holly McDowell, Gregory A. Wilson, Vincent Jorgensen, and Kelly Swails! It's Tuesday! And It's free!

A monthly feature of our Tuesday Funk readings is the Poem By Bill, which will be back on June 21st as part of our special "Science Fiction Sextuple Feature" edition. Fear not, though—the poem this time will be much shorter than the one from our May 3rd edition!

Please join us on Tuesday, June 21st, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm, for another Poem By Bill, and not incidentally for great readings by Brenda Cooper, Sarah K. Castle, Holly McDowell, Gregory A. Wilson, Vincent Jorgensen, and Kelly Swails! It's free!

Our upcoming special edition of Tuesday Funk, the "Science Fiction Sextuple Feature," features six attendees of the inaugural Wellspring Workshop, an intensive workshop for speculative fiction novelists taking place in Lake Geneva over the course of the next week. And Wellspring would not have been possible without the hard work and commitment of organizer Bradley P. Beaulieu.

While Brad won't himself be reading at our June 21st event, he did stop by our podium in May to read an excerpt from his acclaimed debut fantasy novel, The Winds of Khalakovo. If you were there, this is what you saw and heard:

And for six more vivid imaginings of other times and places, please join us upstairs at Hopleaf in Chicago (5148 N. Clark St.) at 7:30 pm for our free reading, featuring Brenda Cooper, Sarah K. Castle, Holly McDowell, Gregory A. Wilson, Vincent Jorgensen, and Kelly Swails. (Cash-only bar. You must be 21 or over.)

Live long and prosper!

Brenda Cooper is a Seattle-area futurist and writer, and also the CIO for the City of Kirkland. Brenda writes a monthly column for Futurismic called "Today's Tomorrows," and is the author of the Endeavor award-winner for 2008, The Silver Ship and the Sea, and of its sequels Reading the Wind and Wings of Creation. She co-authored Building Harlequin's Moon with science fiction legend Larry Niven.

Her next book is Mayan December, coming from Prime Books in August 2011. Visit her website at www.brenda-cooper.com.

Join Tuesday Funk's special Science Fiction Sextuple Feature on June 21, 7:30 p.m., at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Brenda and the rest of our talented readers!

Vincent Jorgensen is a writer-engineer living in the epicenter of the Silicon Valley. He has been a stay-at-home dad, a microchip designer, and a science-fiction class instructor at UC Berkeley. Vincent loves languages and can speak French and Spanish, as well as read Latin and Greek.

He loves to travel, and once penned a short story during a hurricane in México. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in 2006.

Join our special Tuesday Funk Science Fiction Sextuple Feature on June 21, 7:30 p.m., at Hopleaf's upstairs bar, to hear Vincent and all of our amazing readers!