Season Tickets for all Mainstage events for the 2025/26 Escape Plan Season!
Season Tickets for 9 Main Stage Bushwick events
- All ages
Escape Plan
Bushwick Book Club Seattle’s 2025-2026 Season of Original Music Inspired by Books
This season, the Bushwick Book Club Seattle brings you original music inspired by stories of escape—not just from danger, but from bad jobs, tired tropes, oppressive systems, and the roles we’re told to play. These wildly different books all ask: What happens when we break out of the boxes we’ve been shoved into? From space gays in mech suits to medieval misanthropes, brooding physicists to background characters demanding the spotlight, each story is a bold, funny, heartfelt push toward something freer, weirder, and more true.
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- Email geoff@bushwicknorthwest.com to hold a seat.
- Youth under the age of 22 may redeem tickets free of charge.
SEPT 27 | Hugo House
Original music inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights
What happens if we pay attention? That’s the quiet dare at the heart of The Book of Delights, Ross Gay’s dazzling collection of daily essays that touch on everything from palm readings to Lisa Loeb. Funny, strange, and full of questions, these kaleidoscopic observations invite you to pause and look closer: not to escape from the world, but to escape from distraction.
“Ross Gay’s eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.”—Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate
“You’ll find that the delights of Gay’s world illuminate the delights of yours, that his wonder is contagious and has caused you to deepen your own.” —GQ
Heads up: The Book of Delights touches on difficult topics including racism, animal cruelty, illness, and death. It also briefly mentions sensitive subjects like incest, murder, and sexual themes. (StoryGraph)
OCT 18 | Hugo House
Original music inspired by Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park
Welcome to the escape room with teeth. In Jurassic Park, science breaks the rules, capitalism signs the checks, and a remote island becomes a high-stakes survival game (complete with frighteningly clever velociraptors). Michael Crichton’s techno-thriller classic is a masterclass in hubris, chaos theory, and running very fast. Life finds a way…and then it tries to eat you.
“Jurassic Park is not only a smart novel, it’s Crichton’s smartest novel, and it’s an important look at scientific ethics and possibility that deserves to be reconsidered as a masterpiece of science fiction.” —Tor
“A superior specimen.”—The New York Times
Heads up: Jurassic Park contains scenes of death (both human and dinosaur) and includes sexism and fatphobia. (Does the Dog Die)
NOV 15 | Hugo House
Original music inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
A physicist walks into a revolution. In The Dispossessed, the brilliant scientist Shevek leaves his anarchist moon for a capitalist planet to share a theory of time—and ends up rewriting the future. Ursula K. Le Guin’s visionary tale of walls, worlds, and radical hope is part sci-fi epic, part political thought experiment, and 100% required reading for anyone who’s ever questioned the system.
“Le Guin expanded the boundaries of fiction not just by committing to its revolutionary capacities but also by considering deeply, and with great clarity, other ways of being. The Dispossessed, her most intricate and beautifully realized book, channels her lifelong obsessions—Daoism, pacifism, humanity’s sacred relationship to the natural world—into a moving story that is also about loneliness, will, and what it means to return home. More than a novel, this is an ontological work of extraordinary imagination and compassion.” — Meng Jin, The Atlantic
Heads up: The Dispossessed contains sexual assault, child and adult death, miscarriage, bullying, famine, political conflict, imprisonment, police violence, and institutional systems. (Does the Dog Die)
DEC 6 | Hugo House
Original music inspired by 3 local authors….. InkAloud!
Jan 10 ⎮ Hugo House
Original music inspired by Percival Everett’s James
In James, Percival Everett takes a red pen to the American literary canon—and sets it on fire. Jim, now James, gets the narrative he was denied in Twain’s classic, revealing a mind as sharp as the satire and a heart as big as the Mississippi. Slavery, subversion, and a whole lot of side-eye—this is the remix Huck never saw coming.
“A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own.”—Chicago Tribune
“A provocative, enlightening literary work of art.”—The Boston Globe
Heads up: James contains explicit references to racism, use of racial epithets, sexual violence, anti-Black brutality, and the historical realities of enslavement. (Book Trigger Warnings)
FEB 14 | Hugo House
Original music inspired by Emily Henry’s Beach Read
She writes swoon. He writes doom. Beach Read throws a romance author and a literary fiction snob into neighboring lake houses with matching writer’s block—and a challenge: switch genres, swap cynicism for kisses, and try not to fall in love. Pairing a romance author and a literary sadboy for one summer of swapped stories and creative chaos, Emily Henry’s bestselling smash shows how writing out of your genre is nothing compared to falling for the person you swore you wouldn’t.
“That Henry can manage to both pack a fierce emotional wallop and spear literary posturing in one go is a testament to her immense skill.”—Entertainment Weekly
Heads up: Beach Read contains references to abuse, family trauma, infidelity, grief, miscarriage, cancer, heart disease, alcohol use, and a parent’s death from stroke. (Book Trigger Warnings)
MAR 14 | Hugo House | MEMBERS ONLY EVENT! (Become a MEMBER today to reserve your seat) Tickets FREE with purchase of a membership!
Original music inspired by Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are
Max’s tantrum kicks off one of the most dreamy, defiant, and timeliness stories in children’s lit. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is a beautifully bonkers reminder that escape isn’t always about leaving—it’s about finding space to be your weirdest, wildest self. Let the wild rumpus begin!
“The greatest children’s book ever.”—BBC
Heads up: a kid gets sent to bed without dinner and is (briefly) menaced by monsters.
APR 11 | Hugo House
Original music inspired by William Goldman’s The Princess Bride
Inconceivable? Hardly. The Princess Bride takes the tired damsel-in-distress narrative, flips it, parodies it, and sets it galloping off on an endlessly quotable mission of revenge. William Goldman’s classic satire gleefully dismantles the fantasy genre, only to rebuild it with sharper jokes, deeper feelings, and the best revenge speech in literature. And yes, there’s kissing. Get over it. Anybody want a peanut?
“[Goldman’s] swashbuckling fable is nutball funny . . . A ‘classic’ medieval melodrama that sounds like all the Saturday serials you ever saw feverishly reworked by the Marx Brothers.”—Newsweek
“One of the funniest, most original, and deeply moving novels I have read in a long time.”—Los Angeles Times
Heads up: The Princess Bride contains scenes of weird torture, violence and cruelty, kidnapping, and medieval-brand sexism and fatphobia. (Does the Dog Die)
MAY 9 | Hugo House
Original music inspired by Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown
Lights, camera, stereotype. In Interior Chinatown, Willis Wu dreams of leveling up from “Generic Asian Man” to “Kung Fu Guy” in a cop show called Black and White—but what happens when the role he’s really after is just… person? Part satire, part soul-search, Charles Yu’s groundbreaking novel is a razor-edged commentary on race, identity, and the roles we’re forced to play.
“Conflates history, sociology, and ethnography with the timeless evils of racism, sexism, and elitism in a multigenerational epic that’s both rollicking entertainment and scathing commentary.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Recalls the humorous and heartfelt short stories of George Saunders, the metafictional high jinks of Mark Leyner, and films like The Truman Show.”—The New York Times
Heads up: Interior Chinatown deals with themes of racism, stereotyping, and Hollywood’s depiction of Asian characters, particularly in Chinatown, and briefly mentions war violence. (Book Trigger Warnings)
JUNE 13 | Hugo House
Original music inspired by Hannah Templer’s Cosmoknights
Suit up, space gays. In Cosmoknights, jousting isn’t just for knights in shining armor—it’s for queer rebels in mech suits dismantling the patriarchy one tournament at a time. Pan thought her world was small. Turns out it’s galactic, gritty, and full of laser-scorched possibility. Come for the armor. Stay for the found family, gay crushes, and radical acts of empathy.
“Pan’s superpowers, ultimately, are empathy, and love, which she employs to resolve violent conflicts in surprising ways. With Templer’s luscious art, winsome script, and compelling characters, you can launch your own escape pod into some worthwhile lesbian space opera and fight the patriarchy.” —Plenitude
Heads up: Cosmoknights contains violence, sexism, classism, misogyny, injuries, police brutality, kidnapping, and colonization. (Does the Dog Die)
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