California On Sale

Here’s a brief and bonny update to let you know that all our University of California Press titles are currently 10% off! Do be sure to stop by the bookstore and grab yourself some bargain brilliance. There are plenty of tempting titles to choose from, including…

University of California trio

Anteparadise by Raúl Zurita; translated by Jack Schmitt (bilingual edition)

Zurita is one of Latin America’s most celebrated poets and the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Literature Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Anteparadise, his second collection, is in part a response to the brutality of the 1973 military coup, during which Zurita was arrested and detained for six weeks in the hold of a cargo ship.

Canto General by Pablo Neruda; translated by Jack Schmitt

Canto General is Neruda’s tenth collection, and it’s considered by many to be his masterpiece. This epic work comprises 300 poems and is more than 15,000 lines long, and offers readers a vast and moving history of the Americas.

Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano; translated by Joanna Kilmartin

This novel is a kind of literary hybrid in which a number of genres—detective novel, biography, autobiography—are employed to tell the story of Dora, a fifteen-year-old girl who has run away from her Catholic boarding school. Modiano comes across a Missing Persons notice placed by her parents in a French newspaper, and this sparks off a decade-long investigation into Dora’s fate.

A Lion, a Pirate, and a Round of Roulette

This past weekend saw two of our favorite regular series return to the Malvern stage. First up, on Saturday night the lovely folks from VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities) joined us for another round of The Lion & The Pirate Unplugged, an open mic for writers and musicians of all ages and abilities. Performers included some familiar faces, such as Milton Sullivan, Nicole Cortichiato, Shaniqua Esparza, and KK Marshall, as well as some bold new acts, including Carolyn Cornell, Kamand Alaghehband, and Richard Allen White, who had celebrated his birthday the day before (many happy returns!)

Let April and Laura introduce you to all things Lion and Pirate below, and then click on the Playlist, top left of the video, to watch the performers strut their stuff.

And on Sunday afternoon we welcomed a second batch of talented performers, this time from Austin Writers Roulette, a community of writers, lyricists, and poets who write short works based on monthly themes. June’s theme was “Train Wreck Adventures”… check out the readings below (again, the Playlist link will let you see more of the videos), and then keep an eye on the AWR website for July’s theme so you can join the Rouletters!

Sunday Delights at Malvern Books

Sandra and FrankHere’s wishing you a very happy National German Chocolate Cake Day, book fiends! Let’s honor this joyous occasion by recalling something equally sweet: a sunny Sunday afternoon spent in the company of talented poets Sandra Storey and Frank Pool (pictured at right). We were celebrating the recent release of Every State Has Its Own Light, Sandra’s first full-length collection and a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award. Sandra was visiting us all the way from Boston, and many of her Texas-based family members came out to support her. Sandra was joined on our stage by Austin local Frank, who has recently returned to writing poetry—and we’re very glad he’s back. Thanks to both Sandra and Frank for such a delicious day of verse!

Check out footage from their readings below… and if you like to balance your poetry with a little prose, why not come by the store tonight for Novel Night? We’re very generously offering a sweet-as-cake 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES from 6pm till closing!

BookExpo 2015

It’s that time of year again… BookExpo America! Three days of bookish ballyhoo, featuring an assorted cast of publishers, buyers, and book nerds from across the country…

BEA 15 01And so we put on our sensible shoes and headed off to the ginormous glass monstrosity that is the Javits Center for our annual dose of destiny and power books. (If you missed BookExpo but fancy a trip to the Javits Center anyway, I’m sure there are still tickets available for future Javitsian expos of the non-literary variety… Plastics Today or Cannabis World Congress, anyone?)

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Your tote bag game was strong this year, BEA! Well done. And we can’t wait to take a look at all the intriguing catalogs we happily toted home; nothing gives us more pleasure than contemplating our upcoming orders from brilliant indie presses like BiblioasisNew York Review of Books, and Graywolf Press.

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Of particular interest—three fantastic titles coming up from San Francisco’s City Lights, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. Keep an eye out for I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career (correspondence between Allen Ginsberg and City Lights’ founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti); Pictures of the Gone World (a limited edition reprint of City Lights’ first book, a collection of poetry by Ferlinghetti); and Shock Treatment (a 25th anniversary edition of the first book by iconoclastic performance artist/poet Karen Finley).

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If it’s not already obvious, we love small, independent presses! Even really small presses.

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Of course, the publishing giants were out in full force (is it just me, or was the Ellora’s Cave booth surprisingly low on be-thonged spokespeople this year?) and they had some… interesting offerings lined up. No, we won’t be stocking any of the three titles pictured above—but a taco cleanse does sound pretty fun.

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