One night when Jonathan Safran Foer was 9 years old, his babysitter refused to eat chicken. A confused Foer asked her why, and she blew his mind by explaining that the meat on his dinner plate came from a live animal. "I went from thinking it was the most natural thing to thinking it was the most insane thing," Foer said.

John Irving writes overwrought, Dickensian novels, and he’s damned proud of it. The New England-born author spent much of his reading at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Tuesday night defending himself against imaginary criticisms of his work — criticisms that were remarkably similar to the New York Times’ review of Irving’s new book, Last Night in Twisted River

Author Augusten Burroughs is all too familiar with the disastrous and absurd — to the point that all six of his memoirs (starting with the hugely successful Running with Scissors in 2002) have veered so far from the conventional that critics have questioned whether they’re even true.

Apparently, Burroughs has a knack for attracting chaos even post-youth.

Jonathan Lethem seems the ultimate New Yorker: Born and raised in Brooklyn, the 45-year-old writer first earned literary cachet with his 1999 crime fiction novel, Motherless Brooklyn. His 2003 The Fortress of Solitude is a semi-autobiographic work, also set in Brooklyn. Now, Lethem's touring to promote his newest New York novel, Chronic City, in which narrator Chase Insteadman (a former child actor) befriends an eccentric, marijuana-pumped culture writer named Perkus Tooth.

This season's "Writers & Readers" series has promised and delivered some heavy-hitters to both the basement of the Brookline Booksmith and its larger, glitzier counterpart, the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Tucked in a calendar of events among household names like Nick Hornby, Jonathan Safran Foer, and John Irving is Lorrie Moore, a Midwestern gem known across a growing number of literary circles, primarily for her short stories.

If you track 26 year-old writer Tao Lin’s literary trajectory via his Internet presence and self-promotional stunts, it’s easy to get the sense that he’s on the brink of something really big. The Brooklyn-based author’s follower-to-followees ratio on Twitter is steadily climbing, his MySpace account was recently purchased for a ludicrous sum of $8,100 by an investment banker, and the buzz surrounding his latest work, a novella called Shoplifting From American Apparel, appears to trump that of his prior writings (two poetry collections, a book of short stories and a novel called Eeeee Eee Eee) in both sheer volume and praise.

World renowned journalist and staff writer for the New Yorker Adam Gopnik spoke yesterday on his new book Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life at the Brookline Booksmith.Full mp3 audio of his reading after the jump . . .