The Dire Reader literary series has a summer feel Friday. It’s been transformed for the day into the The Dire Literary BBQ, with food and music added to the usual readings by up and comers in the literary scene.

It’s not just singer-songwriters and folkies enthusing about “Revival,” the novel by Boston Globe columnist Scott Alarik set in the roots music world in general and Cambridge specifically. The book also too home a Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for Popular Fiction last month.

The Edgar Allan Poe parties start Wednesday with a musical tribute and continues Thursday with a reading in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

The Printer’s Devil Review literary journal gets a launch party tonight at Middlesex Lounge.

The online magazine Salon is talking about The Queer Carrie Project by a 23-year-old Cambridge artist Elisa Kreisinger, the memoir “Let’s Take the Long Way Home” by Cambridge resident Gail Caldwell and a book by the Somerville-inspired Typo Eradication Advancement League.

With Apple selling 3 million iPads in three months and makers of e-readers dropping out of competition, e-Ink might have cause to be worried. But the Cambridge-based maker of e-reader screens is expanding and hiring.

There will be a memorial service Monday for Robert B. Parker, the novelist who wrote his famed mysteries from a window desk in his Ash Street home. Tributes by writers Sue Grafton, Dennis Lehane and Calvin Trillin, as well as by Parker’s family, are scheduled.