Game 5 of the ALCS was about an hour from start-time when Nick Hornby took the stage at the Devotion School in Brookline last night. The first question from the floor concerned, not surprisingly, Hornby's take on the current Red Sox series -- given that Hornby's Fever Pitch, a book about English soccer fanatics, had been magically turned into a Farrelly Bros film about Red Sox obsessives, which in turn was famously forced to undergo several last-second rewrites as the real-life Sox miraculously won their first World Series in 81 years.

Given that experience, you'd think Nick Hornby would understand that making even idle, humorous remarks about the Sox' prospects would not be taken lightly by the famously superstitious Fenway faithful. We're not sure if this rises to the level of the Curse of the Bambino, but it's damn well close. (Click above to see what we're talking about, and listen for the audience's audible gasp.) FOR GOD'S SAKE, MAN, THEY WERE DOWN 3-1. The Sox' subsequent drubbing of the Indians notwithstanding, we reserve the right to hold a book-burning on Yawkey Way should Our Boys fail to take two at home.

More from the Hornby appearance, including a reading from his fantastic new "young adult" novel Slam, coming over on Word Up on Thursday of next week. Thanks to Brookline Booksmith for hosting the reading.

In 8: A Memoir, Amy Fusselman’s followup to her excellent first memoir The Pharmacist’s Mate, time, rather than moving in a linear fashion, takes the form of the figure eights the author used to skate when she was a kid. Events, for her, don’t just come and go. Instead, everything from Fusselman's experience in the backseat of a cab to the sexual abuse she suffered in her youth at the hands of her babysitter’s husband stays around, affects her in the present. All of this, of course, makes for a truly strange and chaotic narrative. But we're just happy anytime somebody shakes up a genre that too often bores us to death. What follows is a quick sampling of our Q&A with the author.

A one-time budding academic who for existential reasons drops out of Colombia University to work as a hot dog vendor, Mortimer Taylor Coleridge doesn’t even like pop music. Nor is he familiar with VH1, the channel on which he first comes across Gwen. But it isn’t long after the encounter that he’s carefully considering No Doubt’s lyrics and patroling message boards for clues about his ain true love's character. It is in the former moments that first-time novelist Evan Mandery’s spoof of celebrity worship really soars. At one point, a portion of a verse from “Six Feet Under” serves as the inspiration for a theory on the meaning of life. Later, a grammatical error in the beginning of the hit “Don’t Speak” prompts Mortimer to revise in a hilariously highfalutin manner. Suffice it to say the brainiac replaces the line “We used to be together” with “Erstwhile sidekicks.”

A long time ago, when we were temping in an office that reduced us to a trained data-entry monkey, the only way we could halt the onset of a mental breakdown was to stream archived episodes of NPR’s This American Life off the internerd. It was in this way that we discovered the delightfully snarky DAVID RAKOFF, who not only dresses better than like-minded contemporary David Sedaris but often delivers the acidic wit with 10 times the panache. And then there’s his Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, which, lets face it, kicks major subtitle ass. Nobody’s off the hook in Rakoff’s essays — not even Karl Lagerfield. He’s at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | free | 617.566.6660.

STREAM our fave Rakoff contributions to TAL:
1. Promised Land: He does a 20-day fast to see if it brings him any form of enlightenment. Weird and disturbing things come out of his body.
2. Meet the Pros: He visits his dream job, the craft department at Martha Stewart Living Magazine. Quite literally, one of the funniest things we've ever heard.
3. Office Politics: He's an editorial assisant at a NYC publishing house, but his boss keeps calling him a secretary. Major dramarama.