Author Eleanor Herman will be at Politics and Prose at 7 PM Wednesday to discuss Mistress of the Vatican, her biography of the woman known as “the secret female Pope.” Sold? If not, Bourbon in Adams Morgan is hosting a Q&A with Whitney Matheson Thursday at 9. She’s author of the popular Pop Candy blog on USAToday.com. Grab a drink and chat about indie rock, comic books, TV, and other pop-culture topics.

Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe’s summer music series is coming to end soon, so stop by after work or before you head out on the town any night Wednesday through Saturday. Busboys and Poets is also pushing through the week with a selection of artists: Chester River Runoff performs on Wednesday and PS24 on Friday.

The National Gallery of Art’s Jazz in the Garden series hosts the rhythm-and-blues jazz band Daysahead at 5 PM on Friday in the sculpture garden. If you’re not in the mood for music, the film series is showing Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures, related the exhibit of the same name, at 11 PM in the East Wing’s auditorium. Mixing nonfiction, semifiction, and other narrative styles, the movie documents the country’s artistic legacy in the form of an experimental video. Saturday also looks good, as Dante’s Inferno comes to the big screen at 4:30 PM. The Portuguese film A Divina Comédia transfers the setting to a mental asylum, where characters from Dostoevsky’s novels mingle with Adam and Eve and other literary favorites. Weird? Or is it so perfect that it just might blow your mind?

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