Two really interesting reading events tonight, especially if you’re curious about the future of literature.

First: Jonathan Twingley, an illustrator whose distinctive portraits have appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly and other publications. His style is unflattering and strangely appealing all at once, something like the Very Hungry Caterpillar meets Picasso. His book, "The Badlands Saloon," is a beautiful object the likes of which the book world doesn’t often make: A full-color illustrated book for adults.

"The trickiest thing about selling the book was its strange format -- it's really not a graphic novel, it's not a kid's book, it's not an art book. It's just a story in pictures and words, sort of a children's book for big people," says Twingley, who was raised by an art teacher and a librarian; thus words and pictures go naturally together for him.

The story’s a classic artist-as-a-young man tale in which the young man strongly resembles the one wielding the brush: A North Dakotan educated in Minnesota, relocated to New York, then returned to the prairie for a summer in a tourist town to drink some beers, meet some characters, figure things out. For instance, how does an artist actually make a living? For Twingley himself, perhaps diversifying into books will be the answer to that one, especially as illustrators watch the landscape shift around them.

"Traditional publishers' heads are spinning at the moment, trying to figure out how to function in a world that no longer recognizes the traditional rules. As an illustrator who's worked regularly for newspapers and magazines for over 10 years, it's been not a little bit unsettling," says Twingley. "When you see 150-year-old papers like the Rocky Mountain News or the Seattle Post Intelligencer shutter their doors, well, it scares you a little bit. And not only because it's been my livelihood, but there are very real questions about 'hard journalism' versus what the Truth looks like in the virtual reality we find ourselves in today.

"As an artist, though, it's really nothing new. Artists have always been compelled to redefine how they fit into popular culture, and in the end that's all we're doing again. Again and again and again."

Also tonight: St. Paul writer and Hamline instructor J.C. Hallman. His story collection, "The Hospital for Bad Poets," seeks out the surreal moments that elevate the modern condition: A boy whose father has abandoned him makes a mannequin in the garage; a black-sheep uncle develops a secret friendship with his nephew; a man who keeps finding nurses willing to swap germs with him. In other stories, he trips right past modern into post-modern, experimenting a bit with the boundaries of reality.

Hallman grew up in a planned community, which gave him a humorously jaded perspective on suburbia.

"Growing up in a place that was designed, above all else to be safe — to deny any extremity of emotion, either very good or very bad — puts one, as a writer, into a peculiar relationship with the idea of the dramatic. You're not exactly assaulted with a lot of ready-made plots. So growing up in utopia meant, for me, that I had to figure out how to introduce drama to a situation that was not inherently dramatic.

"For me, that took the form of experimenting with the fantastic, the fabulist, and eventually, the experimental and postmodern. For some, the way to describe ordinary, undramatic suburban life is to introduce loud plots that crack the silence. I wanted to find another way to depict that silence, without introducing extremely rare or unlikely events."

Jonathan Twingley at Magers & Quinn, 7:30 p.m. July 23, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis, 612-822-4611.

J.C. Hallman at Common Good Books, 165 Western Ave. N., St. Paul, 651-225-8989.