Raleigh
Parnin-palooza: Richard Bacchus and the Luckiest Girls, Dirty Little Heaters, Left Outlet

The Pour HouseIt’s a smorgasbord of rocking rumble. Left Outlet ply noisy, hip-shaking post-punk whose ringing guitar distortion brushes against bluesy grooves. It’s simultaneously foot-tapping and odd. The Heaters’ muscular garage-blues bluster rips more than David Banner’s pants, but there’s nothing green about their sound. Former D Generation guitarist Richard Bacchus mines a similar punk-fueled clamor with a ragged, tuneful, leather-jacketed strut that all but broadcasts cool. Elvisfest founder Dave Quick fronts crackling old-school rockers The Poonhounds. Free rumble at 9 p.m. Chris Parker

Raleigh
Denise Giardina

Quail Ridge Books & MusicWuthering Heights, one of the greatest English novels of the 19th century, depicts a stormy love affair among the moors, with all the gothic hallmarks of the Romantic genre (violence! forced marriage! ghosts!). After writing a string of novels set in locales from medieval England to Nazi Germany, author Denise Giardina decided to try her hand at depicting England at the time Emily Brontë wrote her sole novel. “I immersed myself in the culture of the time, the literature, the music, the economic and political situation,” Giardina said of her novel Emily’s Ghost: A Novel of the Brontë Sisters in a recent telephone interview. She succeeds. In Giardina’s rendering, Yorkshire’s moors come alive for Emily Brontë, as they later would for the fictional Catherine and Heathcliff. The book’s main concern is Brontë’s relationship with curate William Weightman. “He was the only man outside her family that Emily grew close to,” Giardina said. Asked why she wrote about Emily rather than her sister-authors Charlotte or Anne, Giardina said, “I find Emily to be by far the most interesting. I was interested in her independence, her disinterest in traditional marriage and Charlotte’s declaration that freedom was important to Emily above all else.” The event is sure to intrigue literature and history buffs alike. For more information, visit www.quailridgebooks.booksense.com. Sarah Ewald