Join us for the third event in our Novel Night series, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: two published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. We’ll then have an open mic for writers who have signed up to read from their unpublished short stories or novels. And finally, we’ll have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles and invite questions from the audience. Also worth noting: there will be snacks!

This month Thomas McNeely will read from Ghost Horse, his debut novel, which Library Journal describes as “sensitive, beautiful, and ominous throughout … as if Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson teamed up to write a 1970s Texas YA novel that went off the rails somewhere—in a very, very good way.” And Mike Freedman will read from his debut novel School Board, a “darkly comic and charming as heck” allegory.

A former Wallace Stegner and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Thomas H. McNeely has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and non-fiction in Ninth Letter; his stories have been included in textbooks and anthologies including What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, and Best of the South: Stories from the Second Decade of New Stories from the South, and shortlisted for the Pushcart, O. Henry, and Best American Short Stories collections. He teaches in the Stanford Online Writing Studio and the Emerson College Honors Program, and lives near Boston with his wife and daughter.

Mike Freedman lives in Houston, where he was born and raised. Upon graduating from Tulane University, Freedman volunteered for the Army and served in the Special Forces as a Green Beret. He graduated from the Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business in 2014. In his first novel, School Board, a rabble-rousing high school senior class president takes on the school board incumbent, a senior executive at an Enron-like company. Mike is currently working on his second novel.