Malvern Books

Join us in celebrating the launch of Adam Crittenden’s debut full-length poetry collection, Blood Eagle. With readings from poets Adam Crittenden, Daniel Roessler, and Nick Courtright (left to right, below).

Adam Crittenden is partial to happiness, even/especially during times of impending doom (mythological, Biblical, psychological, imaginal). Give this book a chance to show you its necessities, to demonstrate what ink and paper can continue to do that flesh and blood cannot. In a century where a face can be successfully transplanted, why not a voice? Who doesn’t want to be remade? Go ahead. Traipse into this twisted forest (before the first light bulb falls), and you might well agree that “we should have left / after the first few minutes / but by now it is too late.”

~Timothy Liu, author of Don’t Go Back to Sleep

Adam Crittenden holds an MFA in poetry from New Mexico State University, where he was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. He also serves as an editor for Lingerpost and Puerto del Sol. His work has appeared in decomP, Bayou Magazine, Metazen, Barn Owl Review, Whiskey Island, and other journals. Blood Eagle is his first full-length book of poetry and is available now from Gold Wake Press. Currently, he teaches writing in Albuquerque at Central New Mexico Community College.

Daniel Roessler is a poet and an aspiring mystery/thriller author who currently resides in Austin, Texas. He is a member of The Writer’s League of Texas, the Academy of American Poets, and an active participant in the Writer’s Digest Poetic Asides community, placing in several contests. Daniel has previously published one nonfiction book, numerous magazine articles, and a three-part guest blog series for Writer’s Digest on nature poems.

Nick Courtright’s second book, Let There Be Light, called “a continual surprise and a revelation” by Naomi Shihab Nye, came out in February 2014, and his debut full-length, Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published in 2012. He is an editor and book designer for Gold Wake Press, and the founder and editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in many literary journals, including The Southern Review, Kenyon Review Online, Boston Review, and The Iowa Review, among numerous others, and essays and other prose of his have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine.

Join us in celebrating the recent release of We’ll Live Tomorrow, the debut novel from journalist and aid worker Will Everett.

“Everett’s novel … is about the goals, hopes, faults, and occasionally the success of what he calls Big Aid—in this instance, a postwar reconstruction project more costly than the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II and perhaps even more ambitious.” —Houston Chronicle

“An insightful, impressively broad glimpse of a formidable mission.” —Kirkus Reviews

We’ll Live Tomorrow follows Hunter Ames, an American aid worker grappling with a dark family history and a growing midlife malaise. In an aid compound in southern Afghanistan, under the watchful eyes of the Taliban, he meets the mysterious Karimullah, an exploited “dancing boy” hunted by his master. These two lost souls strike up an unusual friendship in war-torn Afghanistan—Karimullah looking for sanctuary after years of abuse at the hands of a violent master, and Hunter trying to come to terms with his own tragic past. But menacing forces surround them, imbuing their friendship with the promise of salvation and the prospect of tragedy.

While the novel explores a wide range of human-interest issues, such as the doldrums of middle age and the aftershocks of family tragedy, Everett says he had a larger purpose in writing this novel when he did. “Through the book and its layered characters, I hope to give readers an intimate look at a country the U.S. has spent so much time supporting, yet many know little about.”

A native of Texas, Will Everett has reported from the Middle East, South Asia and West Africa for National Public Radio, the BBC, Newsweek and other outlets. With Walter Cronkite he wrote and produced the 2006 documentary World War One Living History Project, honoring the last surviving veterans of World War I. His work has been recognized by the Society for Professional Journalists, the New York Festivals and the National Headliner Awards. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His choral collaboration with Joseph Martin, The Message, was published by Hal Leonard in 2015.

On June 26th Malvern Books will join the world in observation of International Day in Support of Victims of Torture with presentations and discussion. Come join Celia VanDeGraaf, Joe Bratcher, Christopher Brown, Taylor Pate, and Matthew Hodges as we celebrate the survival of victims of torture and wonder in dismay that this practice continues. A significant portion of the event will center on discussion of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture.

The literary community at Malvern Books and the fine arts community at Bone Black Gallery are teaming up to welcome artist and author Kristina Hagman to Austin. Hagman will be presenting her new book, The Eternal Party, at Malvern Books on July 1st, 7pm. And at Bone Black Gallery on July 2nd, 7-9pm, there will be a reception and artist’s talk for 36 Views of Mt. Rainier, her suite of intricate woodblock prints.

In The Eternal Party Kristina recounts the multigenerational stories that led to huge stardom, not just once but twice, as both her grandmother Mary Martin (who played Peter in Peter Pan; Maria in The Sound of Music; and many more well-known roles) and her father, most famously known for two very different roles, first, as the comedic character of Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie and later as the villainous J.R. in Dallas. The book is as much a spiritual search for truth as it is an exposé on celebrity life. At her father’s side on his deathbed, Kristina heard her father keep repeating “forgive me” before he passed. Searching for clues as to what he meant, Kristina delves into her father’s past and details life within fame. Determined to tell her story, Hagman overcame struggles with dyslexia and ADHD to complete the book.

Hagman’s life path veered from that of her father and grandmother and she became a successful visual artist, having honed her skills in the arts community of Santa Fe. Hagman’s work has been displayed at the Pacific Asia Museum (Pasadena, California), Cullom Gallery (Seattle, WA), Antioch University (Seattle, WA), The Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Ketchum, Idaho, KIWA Kyoto International Woodprint Association, Kyoto, Japan and many others. Her work has also been included in more than 40 multi-artist exhibits since 1985. Her suite of woodblock prints, 36 Views of Mt. Rainier, is inspired by Hokusai’s collection Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, of which the piece The Great Wave is most well known. Hagman utilizes Mt. Rainier as a point of entry into exploring landscape from many angles. Works like Dawn embody a sense of calm and natural beauty, showing Mt. Rainier as one of America’s purple mountain majesties. In Rainier From Queen Anne we see the mountain as just one peak amongst many in a crowded city scape. Hagman produces these works using a blend of traditional and modern woodblock techniques.

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

Our July selection is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, a withering, eloquently misanthropic tale regarded by many as the finest comic novel of the twentieth century. If you want to take part in this lively literary adventure, stop by the store, sign up, buy yourself a copy, and get reading. And if you’d like to receive reminders concerning our upcoming book club offerings, email us and we’ll sign you up!

Remarkably, Lucky Jim is as fresh and surprising today as it was in 1954. It is part of the landscape, and it defines academia in the eyes of much of the world as does no other book, yet if you are coming to it for the first time you will feel, as you glide happily through its pages, that you are traveling in a place where no one else has ever been. If you haven’t yet done so, you must.

—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on July 2nd.

Brian Foley (The Constitution, Black Ocean 2014) is coming to ATX in July! Join us for a reading with local writers Stephanie Goehring, Travis Tate, and Marlon Hedrick (plus post-reading drinks at ye olde Spiderhaus).

Bring friends. Buy books. Be happy.

BRIAN FOLEY is the author of The Constitution (Black Ocean, 2014), as well several chapbooks, including Puritan Landfill (Black Cake, 2015) and TOTEM (Fact-Simile Editions, 2014). His poems have appeared in jubilat, Boston Review, Verse Daily, Denver Quarterly, & The Volta. He was selected as a 2014 New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America. He was born and raised in Massachusetts. He lives in Denver, where he is currently at work on his PhD in Poetry & Poetics at the University of Denver.

STEPHANIE GOEHRING is the author of two poetry chapbooks and serves on the advisory council for Conflict of Interest, which covers the Austin visual art and literary communities. She also slings books at Malvern Books and can be found online at StephanieGoehring.com.

TRAVIS TATE is a playwright, poet, and performer from Texas. He is an MFA candidate at the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin studying playwriting and poetry. He has performed on stage as a “giant robot,” “one eyed Bretchian fool” and “citizen of a Berlin night club.” Tate received his BA in Theatre and Dance from The University of Texas at Austin in 2012.

MARLON HEDRICK is a poet from Saipan currently invested in reconfiguring the island as mainland.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Austin Writers Roulette features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who love to perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Twisted Legacy.” Spinning tangled tales, the featured artists will be: BIRDMAN 313, KATHLEEN MAJORSKY, HOPE RUIZ, MAGIC JACK ATX, BRIAN GROSZ, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic will follow intermission. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for the nineteenth 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 also 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: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month our readers will be Myra Mcilvain and Elizabeth Thomas. Myra will be reading from her newest book, The Doctor’s Wife, a work of historical fiction set in nineteenth-century Texas. Elizabeth will be reading from Arden’s Act, her historical romance set in seventeenth-century London.

Myra Hargrave McIlvain is a teller of Texas tales. Whether she is sharing the stories in her books, her lectures, or her blog, she aims to make the Texas story alive. She has free-lanced as a writer of Texas historical markers, written articles for newspapers all over the country and for magazines such as Texas Highways. The Doctor’s Wife is her eighth book—another Texas story. McIlvain lives in Austin with her husband Stroud. Her children are grown, and she enjoys the company of a houseful of grands.

Elizabeth Thomas was born in Mt. Clemens, Michigan. She earned a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her first job after leaving U of M was as an editor and writer for the Gale Group’s Contemporary Authors. For a few years Elizabeth lived in Tucson, Arizona, where her children, Lisa and Joseph, were born. In 1996 she moved to Cedar Park, Texas, a suburb of Austin, where she still resides. In the Austin area, she worked for Barrett Kendall Publishing, and continued to work on her own writing projects. When Barrett Kendall began a precipitous decline, Elizabeth realized she had to change careers, and in 2005 graduated as a registered nurse from Austin Community College. Elizabeth has won prizes in numerous writing competitions, and has had a short story published in Mytholog. Her full-length play, The Circle, has received a stage reading in Birmingham, Michigan, and full production as a special event by the Way Off Broadway Community Theater in Leander, Texas.

Join three Austin indie authors as they read selections from their works and discuss how they made the leap to indie publishing. This month’s guests are James Lopez, Alex Bexar, and Catherine De Young (left to right, below). James will be reading from Sound and Fury / Shakespeare Goes Punk, a collection of alt-punk short stories based on Shakespeare’s works. Alex will be reading from her young adult science fiction title, Now You’re Dead. And Catherine will be sharing her two memoirs, Life In The Trenches: A Retrospective and Life In The Trenches: My Stories.

This event is organized by Write It Already, a local meet-up that encourages people to write—and finish what they start. There will be light refreshments and books by the authors for sale at the event.

H. James Lopez was born on a Navy ship in the Caribbean Sea outside of Barranquilla. He is a construct of too much sun, too much alcohol, and not nearly enough time on land. Since 2009 he has been writing fiction in all the forms which come to mind. Current complete works include two books on Military/Urban fiction including The Blue Star Workaround and The Vegas Slingshot. Also a High Fantasy novel in review and a book about steam warfare in Texas at the time of the Republic.

Alex Bexar, not your typical little girl growing up in the rural South. While most little girls her age were playing with their dolls and wearing frilly dresses, Alex spent her time listening to her uncles and older cousins tell stories about their experiences in the military, reading books about space travel, and watching scary movies. When school was out for the summer, Alex, her friends, and cousins would go out into the woods to plan secret missions and rescue kidnapped spies. Since childhood, Alex has been writing and telling stories to entertain friends and family. Today, Alex Bexar lives in Central Texas and has retired from a career in contract management.

While studying at Parsons School of Design-Los Angeles, Catherine DeYoung created socio-anthropological vignettes of life in the city through her photography. The next ten years she worked in various photographic roles in Hollywood, government/aerospace, and also litigation graphics. After joining the crime lab of a major metropolitan police department, Catherine spent the next six years investigating over 6,000 crime scenes. Now, living back in Texas, she writes about her life in crime. Rumor has it that she inspired a certain character on a certain television show after Hollywood writers came to visit the crime lab.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld & Schandra Madha. Featuring young women writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are E. KRISTIN ANDERSON, SARAH FRANCES MORAN, & SAMANTHA DUNCAN.

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic! Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~8pm – Let the reading begin!

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Nathan Brown’s latest poetry collection, My Salvaged Heart: Story of a Cautious Courtship. With readings from Nathan Brown and Katherine Hoerth.

Naomi Shihab Nye recently said about My Salvaged Heart: “Brave new world! The sizzle of couplings and uncouplings—attraction and romance, ineffable magnetism, mysterious as ever—but doused with a savory dose of Nathan Brown humor, a tilted long-ranging eye that sees the next bend in the road even when he’s standing right here, firmly planted.”

Nathan Brown (pictured above; photo by Rodney Bursiel) is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a PhD in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma where he taught for seventeen years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14 and mostly travels now, performing readings and concerts, as well as speaking and leading workshops in schools, libraries, and community organizations on creativity and creative writing. Nathan has published twelve books. Most recent is My Salvaged Heart: Story of a Cautious Courtship. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. He’s taught memoir, songwriting, performance, and creativity workshops for the Sisters Folk Festival in Oregon, the Taos Poetry Festival, the Woody Guthrie Festival, the Everwood Farmstead Foundation in Wisconsin, as well as Blue Rock Artist Ranch near Austin, Texas.

Katherine Hoerth is the author of four poetry books. Her most recent book, Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots (Lamar University Literary Press, 2014) won the Helen C. Smith Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has been included in journals such as Concho River Review, Pleiades, and Tupelo Quarterly. She teaches writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and serves as poetry editor of Amarillo Bay and Devilfish Review.

Malvern Books is closed all day today, July 24th, for a staff party.

Please join us at Malvern Books for Fantastical Fictions, an odd-monthly event focusing on the literary fantastic across genres and cultures hosted by Rebecca Schwarz and Chris Brown. We plan to bring together writers and readers of fantastic literature in Austin by featuring published writers reading from new works and from examples of fantastic literature available on our shelves. Discussion, Q&A sessions, and open mic for works in progress will follow the readings.

Please email us to sign up for our Fantastical Fictions email list if you’d like to receive news about our upcoming fantastic literature events, as well as announcements about new works of fantastic literature in the store.

This month’s guest is Rick Klaw, editor of The Apes of Wrath, a provocative short story anthology that delves into our fascination with and dread of our simian cousins.

“This impressive anthology includes eighteen short stories by authors ancient (Aesop) and recent (Karen Joy Fowler, Mary Robinette Kowal), as well as three original articles tracing apes in literature, comics, cinema, and theater…. A powerful exploration of the blurry line between animal and human.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“These are all fine additions to any fantasy lover’s library…. Climb up into your tree, peel a banana, and enjoy the treats herein.” —Sci Fi Magazine

Professional freelance reviewer, geek maven, and optimistic curmudgeon, Rick Klaw  recently edited Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard and the acclaimed anthologies The Apes of Wrath and Rayguns Over Texas. His countless reviews and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Austin Chronicle, Blastr, San Antonio Current, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, SF Site, The Horn, The San Antonio Business Journal, Geek Dad, Steampunk, and Cross Plains Universe. Many of these were collected in his book Geek Confidential: Echoes from the 21st Century.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

It’s poetry karaoke time! Held on the first Monday of each month, Malvern Karaoke Mondays is a fun FREE event featuring adventurous verses, snack surprises, and a monthly haiku competition.

Here’s how poetry karaoke works: you roll a 20-sided lettered die and select a poem by a poet whose last name starts with the letter the die landed on—and then you read this poem aloud for everyone to enjoy. (Poems can be chosen from a book on our shelves, or from one of the anthologies we’ll provide.) Everyone is welcome to take part, but please note that participants can’t read their own poetry—poetry karaoke is all about introducing people to the poems and poets that have inspired you.

And if you fancy yourself as a haiku whiz, you should enter our monthly haiku contest, judged by our curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe (and/or a guest judge of his choosing). For this month’s contest you’ll need to provide the first and third lines that best accompany this second line:

rats live on no evil star

COMPETITION CONDITIONS: Haiku must be submitted to info@malvernbooks.com by midnight on Saturday, July 30th. We’ll announce the winner at the event on Monday. Prize = $10 Malvern Gift Card (which must be picked up in-store) and you’ll be listed in our BOOK OF HAIKU WINNERS. All decisions final. No crying!

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

Our August selection is Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns, a beguiling tale of marriage gone awry in 1930s London. If you want to take part in this lively literary adventure, stop by the store, sign up, buy yourself a copy, and get reading. And if you’d like to receive reminders concerning our upcoming book club offerings, email us and we’ll sign you up!

[Comyns’s] capturing of youth is so fresh and accurate that nothing is lost in the passing of decades. There is a modern sensibility at play in her women and their experiences, their attitudes and reactions towards love and sex, marriage and having children . . . Comyns’s skill is subtle and surprising.

—Lauren Goldenberg, Music and Literature

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on August 6th.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Christopher Carmona’s debut short story collection, The Road to Llorona Park.

The Road to Llorona Park is a collection of short fiction about the changing world of la frontera/the borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. The stories center around the current times when the political upheavals of Mexico began to effect peoples lives on both sides of the border.

“Carmona is a gifted storyteller. The stories in this collection are thematically courageous and the characters are tender, funny, harsh and loving all at once. He has written a vibrant and honest portrayal of a place with complicated characters who face an unjust system and world. These necessary stories will burn in your memory for a long, long while.”—Angie Cruz, author of Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee

Christopher Carmona was the inaugural writer-in-residence for the Langdon Review Writers Residency Program in 2015. His story, “Strange Leaves,” was the third finalist in the Texas Observer Short Story Contest of 2014. He was also a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2013. He has been published in numerous journals and magazines including Trickster Literary Journal, Interstice, vandal., Bordersenses, and the Sagebrush Review. His first collection of short stories, entitled The Road to Llorona Park, was published by Stephen F. Austin University Press in 2016. He has recently edited an anthology called Outrage: A Protest Anthology about Injustice in a Post 9/11 World for Slough Press and was a co-editor for The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writing. He was also a co-author for a scholarly conversation book entitled Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Identities and he has two collections of poetry: beat and I Have Always Been Here. Finally, he is the Artistic Director of the Coalition of New Chican@ Artists.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Twenty Girls to Envy Me (University of Texas Press), an English-Hebrew poetry collection from the Israeli writer Orit Gidali. This event will feature readings and a discussion with the book’s translator, Marcela Sulak. Marian Schwartz will also read from her recent translation of Calligraphy Lesson (co-translated with Leo Shtutin, Sylvia Maizell, and Mariya Bashkatova), the first English-language collection of short stories by Mikhail Shishkin.

Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected and New Poems of Orit Gidali features three dozen poems by the extraordinary Israeli writer Orit Gidali (b. 1972; pictured above), a unique voice among her contemporaries. Gidali’s work appears to focus on the domestic, but for her, the domestic sphere is the stage on which the drama of the geopolitical is reworked on an individual scale. The domestic is always inhabited by the Other, who in these deeply personal poems appears in various guises: a Palestinian mother, biblical figures, the poet’s own deceased mother, and her husband’s first wife. Gidali creates a space in her world to imaginatively reconfigure the current political impasses of the region through a focus on relationship and openness. Gidali’s poems, beautifully captured in English by Marcela Sulak, present a world beset by danger and uncertainty, yet they nonetheless cry out for community, connection, cooperation, and coexistence.

Orit Gidali has published three collections of poetry, as well as a children’s book. She teaches at Tel Aviv University and organizes workshops in collaboration with the author Eshkol Nevo.

Marcela Sulak is the author of two collections of poetry, Decency (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Immigrant (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and one poetry chapbook, Of all the things that don’t exist, I love you best (Finishing Line Press, 2008). She has co-edited Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press, 2015). Her four book-length poetry translations from Hebrew, Czech, and French include Twenty Girls to Envy Me (University of Texas Press, 2016), A Bouquet of Czech Folktales by Karel Jaromir Erben (Twisted Spoon Press, 2012), May by Karel Hynek Macha (Twisted Spoon Press, 2005, 2010), and Bela-Wenda. Poems from the Heart of Africa by Mutumbo Nkulu-N’Sengha (Host Publications, 2011). She is an Associate Professor of English at Bar-Ilan University, and she is an editor at The Ilanot Review. She also hosts a weekly literary podcast on the online radio station TLV.1 called “Israel in Translation.”

Marian Schwartz has translated Russian classic and contemporary fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art for over forty years. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and has retranslated half a dozen Russian classics, including Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In addition to half the stories in Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories of Mikhail Shishkin, she also translated Shishkin’s novel Maidenhair for Open Letter Books. Forthcoming in January 2017 is her translation of Andrei Gelasimov’s novel Into the Thickening Fog.

Join us for the twentieth 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 also 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: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month our readers will be Marcia Feldt and D. Ellis Phelps. Marcia will be reading from her debut novel, The Oys & Joys, which has been described as “Golden Girls meets Sex and the City.” D. Ellis Phelps will be reading from her book, Making Room for George, a story of a woman whose life takes a surprising turn when her father-in-law comes to stay.

Marcia Feldt is an Amazon bestselling author of her debut novel, The Oys & Joys. Marcia enjoys performing onstage, traveling anywhere at anytime (flying over Mt. Everest, a favorite so far), and writing her next novel.

D. Ellis Phelps’ recent publications include the novel Making Room for George; Moon Shadow (Sanctuary Press, 2016); art, essays, and poetry in Voices de la Luna (forthcoming, August 2016); Tupelo Press 30/30 Project (March 2016); Energy magazine, Nov/Dec 2015; and Poet’s Billow (Bermuda Triangle Prize for Poetry, 2015).

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Join us for a reading with a rad lineup of poets both touring and local. Featuring Jon Nakai Valjean, Elijah Pearson, alli simone defeo, EE Jarvie, and EVIL MTN—a bunch of post-alt-lit poets trying to make a living in this topsy turvy world. This poetry event will be heavily influenced by positivity, love, and nature.

JON NAKAI VALJEAN is the long lost son of nic cage. born of pure declaration stealing adrenaline, under a blood moon on a friday. has a special connection to bread. favorite movie: con air (no relation)

EVIL MTN is an evil mtn @evilmtn

EE JARVIE is a poet living in austin, tx. they spew nonsense/feelings/nonsense feelings on twitter dot com @itseejarvie

ELIJAH PEARSON (@smallpuddle) is 21 which means they can Legally drink hahahahaha wild so chill and cool.

ALLI SIMONE DEFEO is a traveling poet and visual artist. they are a lover of horses and carry 25 stones in their backpack because they are a magician. they are also known as the fastest poet alive.

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “New Unwritten Rules.” The featured artists are: DONNA DECHEN BIRDWELL, HOPE RUIZ, UDELLE ROBINSON, BRIAN GROSZ, TERESA Y. ROBERSON and THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us in celebrating the recent publication of Bernard Pearce’s The Deed To My Bones, a collection of poems, photos, and visual art. Featuring spoken word and poetry readings from Bernard Pearce, Jim Trainer, and Brian Grosz.

Bernard Pearce (above left) is a Louisiana native born in the rural community of St. Martin Parish. He attended St. John’s College in Santa Fe, and returned to Louisiana to pursue a life immersed in music and art. He has owned and operated several music and arts venues in Lafayette, Louisiana. Bernard has recorded and released two full-length recordings with his band One Man Machine and has toured internationally with this group. He has participated in a residency sponsored and organized by The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York City. Bernard has also read at the Allen Ginsberg memorial. Bernard has recently published a collection of poems, photos, and visual art entitled The Deed to My Bones.

Jim Trainer’s (above center) work has appeared in Raw Paw 6: Alien, The Waggle, Philadelphia Stories, Divergent Magazine, Anthology Philly, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, Verbicide Magazine, A Series of Moments and PoetryInk. The release of September, his second full-length collection of poetry, coincides with the founding of Yellow Lark Press. Trainer lives in Austin, Texas where he serves as curator of Going For The Throat, a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence, and romance.

Brian Grosz (above right) is a storyteller, actor, voiceover artist, painter, graphic designer, chef, cooking instructor, musician, tattoo enthusiast and an aging Eagle Scout trapped in a punk rock ethos. Squalor, his premiere collection of poetry and essays is out now. He currently calls Austin his home but still talks like a New Yorker—loud, fast, and crass.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

The greatest authors of Ancient Greece and their modern counterparts have asked many of the same questions about the world; questions about death, beauty, politics, love, language, and God, for instance. This group will host parallel meetups to try to understand the answers (and further questions!) great thinkers have given us. With these big questions in mind, we will study works of Ancient Greek philosophy, history, and drama as well as modern works of fiction. All are welcome. Please come as you are, with or without experience reading these kinds of books. All Greek works will be available for free online and can be read in a translation of your choice. We will do our best to choose modern literature available for free online or accessible at Austin public libraries. More information is available on our Meetup Group page.

At this meeting we’re going to discuss Plato’s Protagoras. In the Protagoras, Socrates and a group of sophists discuss various related questions. As in the Meno, the nature of virtue and its teachability are emphasized, but here, Socrates is talking not to a young political upstart like Meno, but to older, cleverer interlocutors.

Join us for a brand-new FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless poetic universe!

Held on the fourth Tuesday of every month and hosted by François Pointeau, Malvern’s Multi-Verse will feature readings from guest poets, plus a Q & A session. Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month François will be talking with local poets Michael Gilmore and Richard Cole.

Michael Gilmore was born on Port Royal Island, South Carolina and as a child grew up on Marine Corps, Navy, and Army bases from coast to coast. After serving in the Army himself, he moved to Austin and attended the University of Texas. In the 80’s he co-founded and co-edited Aileron, a literary journal, publishing the likes of David Weavil, Christopher Middleton, Daisy Aldan, and Charles Bukowski. It was at this time, his own first book of poetry, Lyrika, was published. In 1989, he married and moved, first to Taipei, then New York City, Iowa, and Hsin Chu, before returning to Austin in 1999, where he has since resided. In 2008, Dalton Publishing released Restless Astronomy, new and selected poems. He currently works for the University of Texas.

Richard Cole was born in Krum, Texas. He has published two books of poetry, The Glass Children (The University of Georgia Press) and Success Stories (Limestone Books). His third book, Song of the Middle Manager, was recently accepted by Kalos Press and will be released in 2017. He is also the author of a memoir, Catholic by Choice (Loyola Press). Honors include an NEA fellowship, a Loft Mentor Series award, and a Bush Foundation grant. His poems and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Poetry, Hudson Review, Sun Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and Image Journal—Good Letters. Cole is also a painter. His oil paintings have appeared in Windhover Journal and several galleries in Austin. Cole works as a freelance business writer. He has never taken a writing workshop, though he has taught quite a few. 

In association with Bat City Review, join us in celebrating the launch of Susan Briante’s new poetry collection, The Market Wonders. Susan will be joined by writers Rebecca Liu, Corey Miller, and Maya Perez.

In The Market Wonders, the Market itself becomes a thinking person: lover, parent, poet, philosopher. . . . Briante pushes the poetic domain beyond the lyric, beyond traditional subjects like nature (although the poet’s consciousness omits nothing: cardinals in a tree, for instance), and into enumeration as meditation, money movement as an overarching shared consciousness. Briante turns the expectations of poetry upside down when she explains “I wish more poets would write about money,” and a fairytale narrated in footnotes suddenly has exact measurement thrust into it. By the end of the book, we see how financial theories, rightly or wrongly applied can distort the ordinary acts of living, impoverish entire communities. There is nothing, however, impoverished about The Market Wonders, a work rich with marvels drawn from our ordinary world.

Photo of Susan Briante: Cybele Knowles

Susan Briante’s most recent book The Market Wonders (Ahsahta Press) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. The Kenyon Review calls it “masterful at every turn.” She is also the author of the poetry collections Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011), both from Ahsahta Press. Of Utopia Minus, Publisher’s Weekly declared: “this book finds an urgent language for the world in which we live.” Briante also writes essays on documentary poetics as well as on the relationship between place and cultural memory. Some of these can be found in Creative Non-Fiction, Rethinking History, Jacket2 and The Believer. Her poems and essays been collected in the anthologies The Force of What’s Possible, The Volta Book of Poets, Devouring the Green, The Arcadia Project: the North American Postmodern Pastoral, Starting Today: Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, The Sonnets: Rewriting Shakespeare, and An Introduction to the Prose Poem.

A translator, she lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. Her translations have appeared in the journals Bomb, Bombay Gin, Translation Review and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (among many others) as well as in the anthologies Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry and Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry of Uruguay.

Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund and the US-Mexico Fund for Culture. New work has been published in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Guernica and The Progressive. Her research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, cross-genre writing, experimental autobiography, documentary studies, affect theory, and translation. She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Arizona.

Rebecca Liu is a third year poet at the Michener Center for Writers. Her recent poems can be found in Boston Review, VOLT, Web Conjunctions, and Gulf Coast.

Corey Miller was born in southern Illinois and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast and elsewhere.

Maya Perez is a screenwriter and fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in The Masters Review and Electric Literature and she is co-editor of the books On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft and the upcoming On Story: Screenwriters and Filmmakers on Their Iconic Films, both from University of Texas Press. Maya is also a producer for the Emmy Award-winning television series On Story: Presented by Austin Film Festival, now in its sixth season on PBS. She is a graduate of Vassar College and the Michener Center for Writers.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha, and featuring young women writers from the Austin community (and beyond!). This month’s I Screamers are *ELLIE FRANCIS DOUGLASS, DANIELLE ZACCAGNINO, & MEG GRIFFITTS.*

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic! Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~8pm – Let the reading begin!

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join us for a reading with UT Austin faculty members. Readers include Deb Olin Unferth, Edward Carey, Lisa Olstein, and Laurie Saurborn (left to right below).

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of three books. Her next book, a collection of stories, is coming out in March of 2017 from Graywolf. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. She is an associate professor at the University of Texas in Austin, and she teaches a workshop at a penitentiary in southern Texas.

Edward Carey is the author of the novels Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva the Twins who Saved a City, and of the Iremonger Trilogy, all of which he illustrated. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. Born in England he now finds himself in Austin, Texas.

Lisa Olstein is the author of three poetry collections, most recently LITTLE STRANGER. This fall Essay Press will release THE RESEMBLANCE OF THE ENZYMES OF GRASSES TO THOSE OF WHALES IS A FAMILY RESEMBLANCE, a winner of their 2015 chapbook contest. A new full-length collection, LATE EMPIRE, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2017.

Laurie Saurborn is the author of two poetry collections, Industry of Brief Distraction and Carnavoria, and a chapbook, Patriot. An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient, her short stories, poems, reviews and photographs have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as American Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. Laurie teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also directs the undergraduate creative writing program. She is currently at work on a collection of stories.

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

Our September selection is Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze, a hard-boiled story of doomed love that careens through a landscape of desperate passion and wild reversals. Bill Pronzini called this novel “an indisputable noir classic,” so be sure to come by the store and pick up a copy for a page-turning summer read. And if you’d like to receive reminders concerning our upcoming book club offerings, email us and we’ll sign you up.

The novel features everything we’ve come to love about noir crime fiction. The dialogue is crackling, stylized and often funny. . . . Chaze’s characters are more memorable than you often find in hard-boiled fiction. . . . Chaze’s gift with words, combined with a plot that moves quickly toward its brutal, startling conclusion, makes Black Wings Has My Angel a trip worth taking for anybody with a taste for the darker side of crime fiction.
—Michael Schaub, NPR Books

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on September 3rd.

The greatest authors of Ancient Greece and their modern counterparts have asked many of the same questions about the world; questions about death, beauty, politics, love, language, and God, for instance. This group will host parallel meetups to try to understand the answers (and further questions!) great thinkers have given us. With these big questions in mind, we will study works of Ancient Greek philosophy, history, and drama as well as modern works of fiction. All are welcome. Please come as you are, with or without experience reading these kinds of books. All Greek works will be available for free online and can be read in a translation of your choice. We will do our best to choose modern literature available for free online or accessible at Austin public libraries. More information is available on our Meetup Group page.

It’s poetry karaoke time! Held on the first Monday of each month, Malvern Karaoke Mondays is a fun FREE event featuring adventurous verses, snack surprises, and a monthly haiku competition. And this month we have a special musical guest: come by at 6.45pm for live folk/blues from award-winning singer/songwriter Anji Kat with Christopher Cesta.

Here’s how poetry karaoke works: you roll a 20-sided lettered die and select a poem by a poet whose last name starts with the letter the die landed on—and then you read this poem aloud for everyone to enjoy. (Poems can be chosen from a book on our shelves, or from one of the anthologies we’ll provide.) Everyone is welcome to take part, but please note that participants can’t read their own poetry—poetry karaoke is all about introducing people to the poems and poets that have inspired you.

And if you fancy yourself as a haiku whiz, you should enter our monthly haiku contest, judged by our curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe (and/or a guest judge of his choosing). To enter, please supply the first and third lines to complete this second line (and remember, the first and third lines must each be five syllables!):

Second line: Melting in the summer heat

COMPETITION CONDITIONS: Haiku must be submitted to info@malvernbooks.com by midnight on Sunday, September 4th. We’ll announce the winner at the event on Monday. Prize = $10 Malvern Gift Card (which must be picked up in-store) and you’ll be listed in our BOOK OF HAIKU WINNERS. All decisions final. No crying!

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! This month we have something rather special: we’re hosting the launch of Joe Kilgore’s latest novel, A Farmhouse In The Rain (shortlisted for the Writers’ Village International Novel Award). We’ll also 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. And jazz guitarist Margaret Slovak will get the evening off to a great start with live music.

Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

A Farmhouse In The Rain is a novel of war and peace, crime and punishment, love and loss, and eventually hope. It’s a sweeping saga of three American soldiers and the women they love before, during, and after World War II.

During the war, the three are given shelter by a French woman. The next morning she is found dead and the trio realize they were the only ones in the house. No one admits guilt yet the event affects them radically and leads to big questions. Who will survive the war? Who will survive the peace? Who will reunite with the love each left behind? And who will be unmasked as the murderer on that fateful night at A Farmhouse In The Rain?

Filled with suspense, sacrifice, and subplots that interlock smoothly, the author’s dark chronicle of lives bound together by fate is a solid addition to the WWII thriller genre. —The US Review 

Joe Kilgore is the author of over twenty short stories and four novels. His short stories have been published in magazines, creative journals, anthologies, and online literary publications. Before turning to fiction, he had a long and successful career with international advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. In addition to his fiction, Joe writes for Austin advertising firm, Bazzirk, Inc., and also serves as a professional book reviewer. He lives in Lakeway with his wife, Claudia, an accomplished artist.

This month we have a special edition of Fantastical Fictions—we’re celebrating the publication of Nisi Shawl’s alternate history/steampunk/historical fantasy novel Everfair. Join Nisi and host Christopher Brown for a reading and discussion.

Nisi Shawl’s Everfair is a book with gorgeous sweep, spanning years and continents, loves and hates, histories and fantasies. Set against the big canvas of King Leopold’s horrific rule in the Congo, her engaging, passionate characters struggle to make the right choices in a world that is almost ours, but not quite. Everfair is sometimes sad, often luminous, and always original. —Karen Joy Fowler

Everfair is an alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated. Shawl’s speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into an exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history.

Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. They are the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Their short stories have appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Their story collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2009 and their stories have been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award.

Fantastical Fictions is an odd-monthly event focusing on the literary fantastic across genres and cultures. Please email us to sign up for our Fantastical Fictions email list if you’d like to receive news about our upcoming fantastic literature events, as well as announcements about new works of fantastic literature in the store.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kimberly Alidio’s new poetry collection, After projects the resound (Black Radish Books). With readings from Kimberly, kt shorb, and Morgan Collado.

These poems are attuned to as many zeitgeists as reveal themselves. From Alidio’s dissecting eyes and focused hands—the “I [who] can sense the space around objects in the room because I’m often unnoticed”—the Filipino trait of Kapwa (interconnectedness) enables poems to arise and they bespeak: “This is exactly what gentleness is // dragging everything up whole—” —Eileen R. Tabios

Kimberly Alidio (center, above) wrote After projects the resound (Black Radish, 2016) and solitude being alien (dancing girl press, 2013). She held residencies at the Center for Art and Thought, Kundiman and VONA, and received fellowships from the University of Illinois’s Asian American Studies Program and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. She is a high-school history teacher and tenure-track dropout born in West Baltimore, raised in Baltimore County and living in East Austin.

kt shorb (left, above; BM, Oberlin Conservatory; MA, UT-Austin) is a director, writer, and performer who grew up in Massachusetts, rural Japan, and Tokyo. She trained and worked with Anne Bogart, Pirrone Yousefzadeh, Adelina Anthony, Sharon Bridgforth, Pauline Oliveros, and John Luther Adams. shorb is the Producing Artistic Director of the Generic Ensemble Company. Directorial work includes: THE MIKADO: RECLAIMED; ROBIN HOOD: AN ELEGY; WHAT’S GOIN’ ON?; THE EXPERIMENT (2012); STUCK ON GEE-DOT; THE PSYCHOPOMP PROJECT; RADIO KADUNA; A TORTOISE WALKS MAGESTICALLY ON WINDOW LEDGES; and EAGLE WOMAN POEMS. Her solo show, UNA CORDA has been performed in Chicago, Urbana-Champaign, Los Angeles, Oberlin College, and various Texas locations. She has served as faculty at Southwestern University and UT-Austin. She is currently directing on a solo performance installation by Shay Youngblood. She was a 2015 invited fellow at the Peer Leadership Exchange for the National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation in Minneapolis, hosted by Pangea World Theater and Art2Action.

Morgan (right, above) is a working class femme trans Latina of Colombian and Puerto Rican origin. She works in Austin as a poet, performance artist, community organizer and family builder. She believes the revolution is not some distant day in the future but is right now by living, loving and thriving.

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Cultural Mosaic.” The diverse collection of cultural storytellers is: HOPE RUIZ, LUUK BERTUS, KAMILA FORSON, DANIEL DAVILA, MAGIC JACK ATX, VELMA M. ROBERSON, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, BRIAN GROSZ, & THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kimberly Lambright’s new poetry collection, Ultra-Cabin (2015 winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award). With readings from Kimberly Lambright and Ben Kopel.

About Ultra-Cabin:

Combining the raw confessional with post-ironic deconstruction, the poems in Ultra-Cabin catalog the uneven hardships of language and connection with so much triumph and backdoor playfulness that you may find yourself moved and utterly abandoned to your greater self.

“Artful and wry, smart and moving—Kimberly Lambright’s poems are made of such carefully rendered moments that the mundane becomes very wonderfully strange. Ultra-Cabin is a book that will knock you out and invite you in, sometimes in the same brilliant breath.”—Kathryn Nuernberger

“I am stunned by Kimberly Lambright’s verbal acuity, its lightning shifts and sudden, diamond-like stillnesses. And there are images in this book that would wake Breton from the dead. Hats off to this uniquely adventurous and mature first volume.”—Christopher Howell

“Emotive and cerebral, giving way to the surrealities of intuition and pushing back with a keen intelligence.” —Ruth Williams

Kimberly Lambright is a poet and scholar living in Austin, Texas. She studied cultural theory at NYU and creative writing at Eastern Washington University. She’s a MacDowell Colony fellow and her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, Bone Bouquet, The Boiler, Wicked Alice, and Big Bridge. Her first full-length collection of poems, Ultra-Cabin (2016), is the winner of the 2015 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

Ben Kopel is the author of VICTORY, which came out from H_NGM_N Books in 2012. He teaches classes on composition, creative writing, literature, and media studies at Skybridge Academy, an independent school in Dripping Springs. He is sporadically at work on a new collection of poems possibly titled Sutras of Love & Hate.

Join us for an afternoon with writer Dave Oliphant, who will be reading from his new poetry collection, María’s Book (Alamo Bay Press). Dave will also be sharing poems from the new edition of Figures of Speech (Host Publications), his translation of renowned Chilean poet Enrique Lihn’s collected work. And we’ll get the afternoon off to a great start with live music from jazz guitarist Margaret Slovak (from 3.30pm).

A book forty-one years in the making, written between 1975 and 2016, Dave Oliphant’s María’s Book presents what Douglas Flaherty has called “a delicately passionate record of an internationally conspired love affair. Oliphant’s poems to his wife are valentines for the ages.” With its publication in 2016, María’s Book marks the golden anniversary of Dave and María’s marriage.

Enrique Lihn’s writings, both creative and critical, are considered in Chile some of the most significant in the country’s distinguished literary history. This bilingual volume is the most complete collection of Lihn’s work in English. As well as some of Lihn’s familiar poems, this volume includes representative poems from a number of his later books, previously uncollected pieces, and selections from his final moving sequence, Diary of Death.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha, and featuring young women writers from the Austin community (and beyond!). This month’s I Screamers are Julie Howd, Claire Bowman, and Paz Pardo.

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic! Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~8pm – Let the reading begin!

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join three Austin indie authors as they read selections from their works and discuss how they made the leap to indie publishing. This month’s guests are Christy Esmahan, Aaron S. Gallagher, and Carolyn Cohagan (left to right, below). Christy will be reading from Sinco, a love story set in Spain. Aaron will be reading from Magician, Martyr, and Bleecker, his urban fantasy and detective novels. And Carolyn will be introducing us to Time Zero, a Young Adult Dystopian novel.

Christy Esmahan grew up in Cincinnati. She attended Miami University, then received a doctorate from the Universidad de Leon in Spain. She lived in the Basque Country and worked at an American International School for four years. Her first three novels are based on her experiences there. Bueno, her first novel, was a semi-finalist for the 2014 Elixir Press Fiction Award and Sinco, her second novel, is a finalist for this year’s International Latino Book Awards.

Aaron S. Gallagher was born in Syracuse, New York. He started writing when he was five years old. He has written eleven novels and six books of poetry, and has been published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Ares Magazine. He writes mystery, crime, urban fantasy, straight fiction, and thrillers.

Carolyn Cohagan began her writing career on the stage. She has performed stand-up and one-woman shows at festivals around the world from Adelaide to Edinburgh. Her first novel, The Lost Children, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2010, became part of the Scholastic Book Club in 2011, and was nominated for a Massachusetts Children’s Book Award in 2014. Carolyn recently moved back to her hometown of Austin, where she founded Girls With Pens, a creative writing organization dedicated to fostering the individual voices and offbeat imaginations of girls ages 8-17.

This event is organized by Write It Already, a local meet-up that encourages people to write—and finish what they start. There will be light refreshments and books by the authors for sale at the event.

Join us for an evening with poets Tracey Knapp, Patrick Ryan Frank, and Kimberly Lambright.

Tracey Knapp is the author of Mouth, winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award in 2014. She has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, Five Points, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, The Carolina Quarterly and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.

Patrick Ryan Frank is the author of the poetry collections The Opposite of People and How the Losers Love What’s Lost, which won the 2010 Intro Prize from Four Way Books. He studied poetry at Northwestern University, Boston University, and the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. He was recently a Fulbright Fellow to Iceland, and he currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Kimberly Lambright is a poet and scholar living in Austin, Texas. She studied cultural theory at NYU and creative writing at Eastern Washington University. She’s a MacDowell Colony fellow and her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, Bone Bouquet, The Boiler, Wicked Alice, and Big Bridge. Her first full-length collection of poems, Ultra-Cabin (2016), is the winner of the 2015 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

Join us in celebrating the 90th birthday of esteemed poet, translator, educator, and editor Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth. We’ll be rejoicing with music, cake, poetry, friends, readings, and assorted literary shenanigans. Everyone is welcome for what is sure to be a wonderful afternoon.

Dr. Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth is an acclaimed poet, translator, educator, and editor. He was born in Mexico City in 1926, the son of an army officer of Spanish descent and a musician mother of German descent. In 1940 he left Mexico for Texas, making the United States his permanent home. He received a B.A. from the University of Texas in 1950 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1973, and is professor emeritus of Spanish at The University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for more than thirty years. He has written numerous critical studies and has been published extensively in anthologies and magazines. He is the author of the poetry collections Looking for the Horse Latitudes (Host Publications) and Between Day and Night: New and Selected Poems, 1946-2010 (Tamu Press), and the translator of Natural Selection (Host Publications), the collected works of Uruguayan poet Enrique Fierro.

Join us for a book signing with renowned novelist and scholar Ananda Devi, who will be reading from and signing copies of her new book, Eve Out of Her Ruins (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2016; translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman), a harrowing account of the hidden violent reality of life in her native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.

With brutal honesty and poetic urgency, Ananda Devi relates the tale of four young Mauritians trapped in their country’s endless cycle of fear and violence: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve’s best friend, the only one who loves Eve without self-interest, who has plans to leave but will not go alone; Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, inspired by Rimbaud, in love with Eve; Clélio, belligerent rebel, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France.

Eve out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the dark corners of the island nation of Mauritius that tourists never see, and a poignant exploration of the construction of personhood at the margins of society. Awarded the prestigious Prix des cinq continents upon publication as the best book written in French outside of France, Eve Out of her Ruins is a harrowing account of the violent reality of life in her native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.

The book features an original introduction by Nobel Prize winner J.M.G. Le Clézio, who declares Devi “a truly great writer.”

Ananda Devi is a novelist and scholar born in Trois-Boutiques, Mauritius in 1957. She has lived in Ferney-Voltaire, France (near Geneva) since 1989, after having spent some years in Congo-Brazzaville. As an ethnologist—she holds a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of London—and a translator, Devi is sensitive to the interconnection between identites and languages. Choosing to write in French, her novels and short stories also incorporate Creole and Hindi. Her incisive, lyrical and shrewd style offers the French language new cultural and linguistic scope linked to her native island.

Devi has published eleven novels as well as short stories and poetry, and was featured at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York in 2015. She has won multiple literary awards, including the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises (2014), the Prix Mokanda (2012), the Prix Louis-Guilloux (2010), and the Prix RFO du livre (2006). Devi was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2010.

Ananda Devi’s U.S. tour has been arranged with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S.

Join us for a FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless poetic universe!

Held on the fourth Tuesday of every month and hosted by François Pointeau, Malvern’s Multi-Verse will feature readings from guest poets, plus a Q & A session. Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month’s Malvern’s Multi-Verse features young writers from the Barrio Writers Creative Writing Program. We will have an interview with Austin Barrio Writers leaders Leticia Urieta and Marilyse Figueroa followed by poetry from some of the young writers and a panel discussion with the poets about the Barrio Writers program.

Barrio Writers (BW) is a creative writing program founded by author Sarah Rafael García, which provides free college level writing workshops to teenagers in underserved communities.

Join us in celebrating International Translation Day with a reading featuring renowned translators Kurt Heinzelman, Liliana Valenzuela, and Jamey Gambrell. And we’re also offering 20% off all books in translation on International Translation Day!

Poet, scholar, translator, and editor, Kurt Heinzelman is Editor-at-Large of Bat City Review and former Director of Creative Writing at the University of Texas. His latest book of poetry is Intimacies & Other Devices, and he is the translator of Jean Follain’s 1953 collection Territoires under the title Demarcations (Host Publications). He is also a member of the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature in Istanbul and Honorary Professor at Swansea University (Wales).

Liliana Valenzuela is an award-winning literary translator, poet, essayist, and journalist. Her bilingual poetry chapbook Codex of Journeys: Bendito camino was published by Mouthfeel Press in 2012. Valenzuela is the acclaimed Spanish language translator of works by Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, Nina Marie Martínez, Ana Castillo, Dagoberto Gilb, Richard Rodríguez, Rudolfo Anaya, Cristina García, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many other writers. Her translation of Sandra Cisneros’ A House of My Own is due out Fall 2016. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and an inaugural fellow of CantoMundo, she works for ¡Ahora Sí!, the Spanish weekly of the Austin American-Statesman.

Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. She has translated works by Marina Tsvetaeva and Tatyana Tolstaya, in addition to Vladimir Sorokin’s three-volume Ice trilogy and his Day of the  Oprichnik and, most recently, The Blizzard. This spring, the one-man show “Brodsky/Baryshnikov” premiered, featuring her translated surtitles of Joseph Brodsky’s poetry. Also this spring, Gambrell was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, which recognizes “a significant contribution to the art of literary translation.”

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

Our October selection is The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf (translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky), a riveting—and unforgettably creepy—tale set in a remote Swiss village. The Black Spider can be seen as a parable of evil at large in society (Thomas Mann saw it as foretelling the advent of Nazism, and noted, “There is scarcely a work in world literature that I admire more”), or as a vision of cosmic horror.

Gotthelf’s talent is to make his horror credible by the simplicity of his style and the acuteness of his psychological perception, particularly of the herd instinct among the villagers. His story is a homily, showing how the everyday moral weaknesses of men and women give an opening to the spirit of evil.
—Piers Paul Read, The Times (London)

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on October 1st.

Join us in celebrating the launch of James Dennis’ poetry collection, Correspondence in D Minor, with a reading from James Dennis and Kirk Wilson.

Correspondence in D Minor is a new collection of poems, many (although not all) of which are written as fictional letters to or from figures from literature, history and scripture. Many of the poems draw upon well established poetry forms. All copies of the limited first edition are numbered, signed and the cover is letter-pressed.

James R. Dennis is a novelist, a poet, and a Dominican friar. Along with two friends, he is a co-author of the Miles Arceneaux mystery series. He also writes and teaches on spiritual matters. He was born in West Texas, and lives in San Antonio with his two ill-behaved dogs. More information about James and the book is available on his website.

A chapbook of Kirk Wilson’s poems, The Early Word, was published by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop at Burning Deck press. His recent work has appeared in Confrontation, Eclipse, Folly, Meridian, Midway Journal, The New Guard Literary Review (Finalist, Machigonne Fiction Contest), River Teeth (Pushcart nomination), Soundings East, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and The Wordstock 10 anthology (selected by Aimee Bender). Kirk’s true crime classic Unsolved, an investigation into ten high profile murders, has been published in six editions in the US and UK.

Opening day seems like it was only yesterday, but in fact Malvern Books turns THREE this week. And we’re celebrating our third anniversary in fine style, with music, readings, and cake. Come on down and join the party!

 * Also worth noting: there will be 25 % off everything in the store all day! *

At 5pm, you’re invited to join us for a communal reading of the entirety of Frank O’Hara’s 1964 Lunch Poems. Come read a verse or two, and enjoy some birthday cake as your reward.

At 6pm, we’ll serve up some tasty snacks. Come eat and be merry!

And at 7pm, we’ll tap our feet to live music from ComeDrumForFun… and eat more cake!

Join us for a reading with Texas State MFA faculty. Featuring Doug Dorst, Jennifer duBois, Steve Wilson, and Roger Jones.

Doug Dorst is the author of two novels, S. (with J.J. Abrams) and Alive in Necropolis, a story collection, The Surf Guru. He has also collaborated on a play, Monster in the Dark (with foolsFURY Theater), and is a staff writer on the TV show Z: The Beginning of Everything (airing February 2017). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and a recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Austin and has taught at Texas State since 2011.

Jennifer duBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was the winner of the Housatonic Book Award fiction and was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stanford University Stegner Fellow, duBois is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award. She teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.

Recent poems by Steve Wilson are out or forthcoming in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Borderlands, Bluestem, Commonweal, Poem, Georgetown Review, North American Review, America, The Christian Science Monitor, Blue Unicorn, New Orleans Review, San Pedro River Review, The Christian Century, New American Writing, Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Midwest Quarterly, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and New Letters; as well as in a number of anthologies, including O Taste and See: Food Poems (Bottom Dog Press), Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by Robert Frost (University of Iowa), Stories from Where We Live: The Gulf Coast (Milkweed Editions), Like Thunder:  Poets Respond to Violence in America (University of Iowa), What Have You Lost? (Greenwillow), American Diaspora:  Poetry of Displacement (University of Iowa), An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow! Press), Classifieds: An Anthology of Prose Poems (Equinox), Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets (Mutabilis) and Going Down Grand: Poetry of the Grand Canyon (Lithic).  His books include Allegory Dance, The Singapore Express, and The Lost Seventh.

Roger Jones earned a BA and MA at Sam Houston State University and a PhD from Oklahoma State University. He has taught at Texas State University since 1987 (when it was still Southwest Texas State University). He has published two full collections of poems and two chapbooks, with a third chapbook to be published in coming months. His poems have appeared for the last three decades in journals that include Cortland Review, Modern Haiku, Connotation Press, Evansville Review, Texas Observer, Poet Lore, Baltimore Review, Kansas Quarterly, and Arkansas Review. He’s been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, and was poetry editor of the Texas Review from 2009-2012.

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Fear of Being Swallowed.” Why wait until Halloween? Start celebrating this Sunday with some haunting spoken word and storytelling by The Austin Writers Roulette! Feel free to wear a costume. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! This month we have something rather special: a SciFi/Fantasy/Speculative fiction-themed reading with two very talented writers! We’ll also 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: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month Emily McKay will share her vampire series, The Farm, a trilogy set in a terrifying post-apocalyptic world where teens are farmed as food and genetically mutated monsters roam the country. And Carl Vick will read from his new book, The Epic of Ur, the story of an immortal man set in a time before recorded history.

Emily McKay is a four time Rita nominee. She’s published twenty-five books with Harlequin, Berkley, Walker Books and Entangled. In 2013, she won the Rita award for Best Young Adult Romance. She is a life-long fan of books, pop-culture, and anything geeky. She has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and baking cookies. When she’s not kicking-ass and scooping cookie dough, she’s watching videos on YouTube. Though her interests may appear broad, the common denominators are swoony heroes and snarky humor. She lives in central Texas with her husband, kids, two mildly-psychotic dogs, two nervous cats and nineteen chickens.

Whether writing music or novels, Carl Vick has always sought different ways of being creative. Although he has written extensively on topics in Philosophy, he began writing his first novel, The Epic of Ur, at twenty-one while still attending school for a Philosophy degree. Carl has found inspiration during his stints living abroad in Chile and Spain. He currently resides in Austin, Texas, where he continues to write captivating works of fiction.

Join us for a reading celebrating the launch of Short Stories by Texas Authors Vol. 2.

Texas Authors have once again allowed their creative minds to open up and expand the Universe in which they live with short stories that captures one’s emotions through the everlasting aspect of storytelling.

In this, the second volume of award-winning short stories, the reader is taken on a personal ride of growth and understanding, then through history both factual and fictional as they explore each side of two wars. Then fear grabs hold of you and shakes you with terror before unleashing giggles and out-right laughs. Those are just a few of the emotions one will experience as they read these seventeen short stories from all parts of Texas.

Here are the winners from this year’s contest:

Join us in celebrating the launch of L.E. Kinzie’s first poetry collection, Ignite. With readings from L.E. and Robin Bradford.

“Kinzie walks the fine line between modern American life and spirituality like a tightrope walker in heels. Her voice is funny, blunt, and sublime.”
—Joe McDermott, internationally awarded songwriter and performer

Ignite celebrates the beauty and sacredness of American life. Kirkus Reviews says Ignite is “a compilation of verse that’s popular in the best sense of the word.”

L.E. Kinzie lives in Austin, Texas, with a ridiculous and ever-changing menagerie of pets and her family. A recovering ex-lawyer, she is a passionate observer of humanity and the common threads that bind us all together—beauty, creation, and creating art.

Robin Bradford is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Mudfish Review and the Texas Poetry Calendar and is forthcoming in The Texas Observer and Friends Journal: A Quaker Magazine. Her literary honors include the Dobie Paisano Fellowship for Texas Writers, O. Henry Award, Texas Literature Grant and a Community Sabbatical Grant from the University of Texas Humanities Institute. A Zen lay teacher, Bradford works as communications director at Austin Community Foundation.

Join us for a poetry reading from the late Max Ritvo’s first collection, Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions). Max’s poetry will be read by Sarah Matthes.

When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon.” Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love—a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures.

Ritvo writes to his wife, ex­-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poems—from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death—it’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets.

Sarah Matthes is a poet, performer, and tall ship sailor from New Jersey. Her work can be found in Prodigal, the Feminist Utopia Project, the Bad Version, and His Majesty the Baby’s online zine. A graduate of Yale, she was a Frederick Mortimer Clapp Poetry fellow in 2013, and is a current fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Joe Doerr’s third book, Tocayo: New & Selected Poems & Songs (Shearsman Books). With a reading from Joe, and a performance of the song lyrics from the book from Joe and his band Churchwood.

“By turns erudite and lyrical, esoteric and oracular, profane and ethereal—Joe Doerr’s Tocayo contains multitudes. This vast miscellany, a bravura poetic performance by every measure, signals the aborning of a new, necessary literary idiom for this mashed-up American age: the ineluctable punk sublime.” —John Phillip Santos

“Disturbs all the codes.” —John Kinsella

Joe Doerr is a poet, musician, and essayist whose first collection, Order of the Ordinary, was published by Salt in 2003. His poems, reviews, and criticism have appeared in numerous journals including Fifth Wednesday, Notre Dame Review, PN Review, and Stand. Doerr is also the singer and lyricist for the acclaimed dystopic blues band, Churchwood, and Adjunct Professor of English Writing & Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife Mary.

Churchwood is an avant-blues quintet from Austin, Texas known for its poetry-driven lyrics, high-energy performances, and eccentric approach to making blues-based rock and roll.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Join us for an afternoon with John Domini, Lowell Mick White, and Alysa Hayes. Domini will read from his recent short story collection, MOVIEOLA! (Dzanc Books); White will read fiction from Inside Outside Upside Down (Buffalo Times Press, forthcoming); and Hayes will read poetry from her forthcoming collection.

John Domini (below center) has earned rare praise for his new set of short stories, MOVIEOLA! Critics are calling it “the smartest kind of fun,” “feverishly exuberant,” and “a glory.” The book offers a romp through the cineplex of the moviemaker’s mind, in which the usual heroes, the superman or the assassin or the sports star, are trotted out for various dry runs. Thus we may recognize the narrative outlines, but we’ve never seen them so twisted. Is this storytelling, or its opposite? Come see if you can find out, as Domini reads from his book and then takes questions. The discussion will also touch on his wide range of other publications—novels, journalism, criticism, and poetry—and on his teaching, at Harvard, Northwestern, and elsewhere.

Lowell Mick White (below left) is the author of three books: Professed and That Demon Life, novels, and Long Time Ago Good, a story collection. Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award and a Dobie-Paisano Fellow, White teaches at Texas A&M University.

An administrator at an Austin software company, Alysa Hayes’s (below right) poetry has appeared in Callaloo and Big Tex[t].

Join us in celebrating the launch of E. Kristin Anderson’s new chapbook, We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press). With readings from E. Kristin, K.D. Lovgren, and Abe Louise Young.

We’re Doing Witchcraft is a collection of feminist poetry about adolescence, the female body, the female experience, poems of protest and poems of selkies. The title poem is about school dress codes and how shoulders and knees obviously bewitch male students…

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and author living in Austin, Texas. She is the co-editor of Dear Teen Me, an anthology based on the popular website and her next anthology, Hysteria: Writing the female body, is forthcoming from Sable Books. She is currently curating Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture for ELJ Publications. Kristin is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks), Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), She Witnesses (dancing girl press), and We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press). Kristin recently took a position as Special Projects Manager for ELJ and is a poetry editor at Found Poetry Review. Once upon a time she worked at The New Yorker.

K.D. Lovgren is the author of novels Photographic and Sea Change and the novella Book of Light and Shadows. Photographic has been a bestseller in Suspense on Amazon Canada. Both novels are Awesome Indies Approved, awarded a place on the list of quality independent fiction. Her poetry manuscript, The Archeology of Us, is under submission. Lovgren is the recipient of a Brown Foundation Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center and a graduate of the oldest women’s college in the U.S., Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Lovgren resides in Austin, Texas.

Abe Louise Young is an independent writer, educator and social justice activist. Her work has won a Grolier Poetry Prize, the Hawai’i Review’s Nell Altizer Award, a Narrative Magazine Story Prize, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing is forthcoming or has appeared in The Nation, WITNESS, New Letters, Feminist Wire and many other journals. She’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Heaven to Me (Headmistress Press) and Ammonite (Magnolia Press Collective). A lifelong social justice advocate, she’s also the author/editor of numerous guides, including Queer Youth Advice for Educators: How to Respect and Protect Your LGBTQ Students; Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays, and Vision from American Teenagers; and an archive of oral histories with Hurricane Katrina survivors, Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History Project. Young earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James Michener Fellow, and holds a BA from Smith College.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Ute Carson’s new novella, Save the Last Kiss.

In Save the Last Kiss, reminiscences of first love are woven through letters from Sophia, a German journalist now living in Spain, as she writes to her dying friend, Klaus. Sophia recalls the emotional experiences they shared as they came of age, and recounts how she wrestled with the discovery that Klaus was in a serious relationship with someone else while courting her. As Sophia writes, she learns that clinging to a romantic attachment from the past risks crippling her capacity to love in the present.

A writer from youth, German-born Ute Carson’s first story was published in 1977. Her story “The Fall” won the Grand Prize for prose and was published in the short story and poetry anthology A Walk through My Garden (Outrider Press, Chicago 2007). Her novel Colt Tailing was published in 2004 and was a finalist for the Peter Taylor Book Award Prize for the novel. Her second novel, In Transit, was published in 2008. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines here and abroad. Carson’s poetry was featured on the televised Spoken Word Showcase 2009, 2010, and 2011 Channel Austin, Texas. Her poetry collection Just a Few Feathers was published in 2011. Her poem “A Tangled Nest of Moments” won second place in the Eleventh International Poetry Competition 2012. Her chapbook Folding Washing was published in 2013 and her collection of poems My Gift to Life in 2014. My Gift to Life was nominated for the Pushcart 2015 Award Prize. Her novella Save the Last Kiss was published in 2016. An advanced clinical hypnotist, Ute Carson resides in Austin, Texas with her husband. They have three daughters, six grandchildren, a horse and a number of cats.

Join us for a FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless poetic universe!

Held on the fourth Tuesday of every month and hosted by François Pointeau, Malvern’s Multi-Verse will feature readings from guest poets, plus a Q & A session. Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month’s Malvern’s Multi-Verse features readings and discussion from ire’ne lara silva and Alan Altimont.

ire’ne lara silva is the author of two poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) and Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), an e-chapbook, Enduring Azucares (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), as well as a short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013), which won the Premio Aztlan. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors for the forthcoming collection of poetry and essays, Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzalduan Borderlands (Aunt Lute Books, 2017). ire’ne is the recipient of the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldua Milagro Award. ire’ne was recently named a 2016-2018 Texas Touring Roster Artist.

Alan Altimont has been translating the largely neglected Latin poetry of Marbod of Rennes (1035-1123 CE), the only early medieval European to write poems about himself, his sexuality, aesthetic experience, and the writing of poetry. He is an associate professor of English at St. Edward’s University, where he has taught various literature, creative writing, and composition courses for more than thirty years.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Bryce Milligan’s Take to the Highway: Arabesques for Travelers, a collection of poems and prose poems. With readings from Bryce Milligan and W. Joe Hoppe, and music from Bryce.

“Bryce Milligan’s Take to the Highway is a book of big heart, big mind, and a big eight-cylinder engine, bringing poems—especially the stretched out prose poems—of distinction and evocative power.” —Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty and Ten Windows

“Take to the Highway is indeed about highways, but more crucially it’s about journeys, and about the intricate memory map of human consciousness. It’s a great pleasure to follow Bryce Milligan along side roads, detours, switchbacks, and eerily beckoning paths; and to encounter at the end a design, a destination, a questing mind at peace.” —Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo

Bryce Milligan is an author working in numerous genres, from children’s books to novels for young adults, to adult poetry and criticism. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN American Center, and the Texas Institute of Letters, his reviews and essays have appeared in many journals and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, et al. The founding editor of Pax: A Journal for Peace through Culture (1983-1987) and (with Roberto Bonazzi) Vortex: A Critical Review (1986-1990), he directed the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s literature program and its San Antonio Inter-American Book Fair and Latina Letters conferences for several years. Milligan has been the publisher, editor and book designer of Wings Press since 1995. Milligan was the primary editor of Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (Riverhead, 1995), which was the first all-Latina anthology to be published by a major American publishing house. He is the author of four historical novels and short story collections for young adults. He is also the author of six previous collections of poetry. His poetry and his song lyrics have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Southwest Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Clover, and Texas Observer, among others. Once upon a time, he was a working luthier and a singer/songwriter (twice a semi-finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s New Folks songwriting competition). He has taught English and creative writing at every level, including workshops from California to Prague. Milligan is a recipient of the Gemini Ink “Award for Literary Excellence” and the St. Mary’s University President’s Peace Commission’s “Art of Peace Award” for “creating work that enhances human understanding through the arts.”

W. Joe Hoppe’s poems have appeared in Analecta, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, and The Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. His poems have been anthologized in Stand Up Poetry, How to be This Man, gumballpoetry.com, and Beatest State in the Union. Joe’s one-of-a-kind poetry video, “$5200 MSTA,” has been shown at the Dallas Video Festival, San Antonio Underground Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, and VideoEx in Zurich, Switzerland. His books include a collection of short stories, Harmon Place (1991) from Primal Press, a poetry collection, Galvanized (2007), from Dalton Publishing, and a second poetry collection, Diamond Plate (2012), from Obsolete Press. Hoppe is the Poet Lariat of Austin’s intellectual variety show The Dionysium. He has hosted numerous poetry events at Austin’s Malvern Books, including interviews of local poets, a reading and discussion of Emily Dickinson, a communal performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl celebrating its 60th anniversary, and an annual memorial reading for the late, great Austin poet Albert Huffstickler. He is currently finishing up a four-year effort to get a customized ’51 Plymouth Cranbrook roadworthy for a trip down Route 66 in the summer of 2017. Hoppe is an Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha, and featuring young women writers from the Austin community (and beyond!). This month’s readers are Darri Farr and Sam Miller.

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic! Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~8pm – Let the reading begin!

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join us in celebrating the recent release of Joseph Somoza’s poetry collection, As Far As I Know (Cinco Puntos). With readings from Joseph Somoza, Ash Smith, and Kyle Schlesinger.

As Far As I Know is a beautiful book. A wise book. For Joseph Somoza, language, and the world around, is like a river, forever changing and flowing toward the sea, going this way and that, according to the geography. He allows the poem to follow along, he says, “to build itself, allow(s) words to call up other words through aural and memory associations and syntactic demands, and see where it will lead.” The seasons change, his mother dies, his wife Jill and he share coffee and make love, and crows begin to populate his city. Somoza transforms this stuff of life into a wonderful music of poetry. It’s a poetry of intimacy and celebration of being human.

Joseph Somoza was born in Asturias, Spain in 1940, and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey; and Chicago. After studying pre-med and English and teaching college in Texas and Puerto Rico, he received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa in 1973 and moved to New Mexico the same year. He taught creative writing and literature at New Mexico State University for twenty-two years, and was poetry editor of Puerto del Sol and a founder and poetry editor of Sin Fronteras Journal. He has published five pamphlets and five full books of poetry, most recently, As Far As I Know (Cinco Puntos Press), and he has an online chapbook (Broadside #38, with paintings by Jill Somoza). He has done readings of his poetry in venues throughout the United States and in Mexico, and has had poems in over 200 hard-copy and on-line magazines, journals, and anthologies. He took early retirement from teaching and editing to have more time for writing mornings in his back yard and taking part in the poetry community in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he lives with wife Jill, a painter. They have three children and six grandchildren.

Ash Smith (Keyfitz) is the author of the chapbooks Water Shed, Come Such Frequency, Pigeon of Tears, and most recently Park of Unwired Asking. She lives in Austin where she works as a web designer for the government.

Kyle Schlesinger is a poet living in Austin, Texas. Recent books of poetry include: Sydney Omarr’s Wild Children, with the artist Flynn Maria Bergann (Planned Obsolescence Press, 2016); Far & Away (Textile Series, 2016); Keep the Change, with Deborah Poe (Great Fainting Spells, 2015); and Parts of Speech (Chax Press, 2014). Scholarly works include Poetry & Typography (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2016) and Threads Talks, with Steve Clay (Cuneiform/Granary Books, 2016). He is proprietor of Cuneiform Press, a nonprofit literary organization specializing in poetry, typography, artists’ books, and music, and the Director of the Graduate School of Publishing at the University of Houston.

Join us for a reading and book signing from members of the Heart of Texas chapter of the Sisters in Crime organization. Featuring Alexandra Burt, N.M. Cedeño, V.P. Chandler, Helen Currie Foster, K.P. Gresham, Laura Oles, Eugenia Parish, Kathy Waller, George Wier, and Manning Wolfe.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

For this special Halloween Edition, ghost stories, costumes, and candy to share are encouraged! Plus, we’ll be announcing the winners of this year’s Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Please join us at Malvern Books for Fantastical Fictions, an odd-monthly event focusing on the literary fantastic across genres and cultures hosted by Rebecca Schwarz and Chris Brown. We bring together writers and readers of fantastic literature in Austin by featuring published writers reading from new works and from examples of fantastic literature available on our shelves. Discussion and Q&A sessions will follow the readings.

This month’s guest is acclaimed speculative fiction writer Robert Jackson Bennett.

Robert Jackson Bennett is a two-time award winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, an Edgar Award winner for Best Paperback Original, and is also the 2010 recipient of the Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer, and a Philip K Dick Award Citation of Excellence. City of Stairs was shortlisted for the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award. His sixth novel, City of Blades, is in stores now.

Please email us to sign up for our Fantastical Fictions email list if you’d like to receive news about our upcoming fantastic literature events, as well as announcements about new works of fantastic literature in the store.

Join us for an evening with writer R.S. Dabney, who will be reading from her first novel, The Soul Mender, book one in The Soul Mender Trilogy.

Judging by the engrossing first volume, this trilogy about two heroines’ perilous mission has the potential to be not only highly entertaining, but profoundly edifying as well. —Kirkus Reviews

Debut author R.S. Dabney’s passion for reading, writing, and exploring thrilling stories about unlikely heroes conquering evil started at a young age, culminating in the completion of her first novel, The Soul Mender. Her favorite books span every genre and she likes to describe her own work as having something for everyone—a sprinkle of suspense, a dash of adventure, and a whole lot of good versus evil.

R.S. grew up running around the red rocks and ravines in the deserts of southern Utah, building forts, fighting battles, and living the lives of all the characters she and her friends created. An avid lover of all things nature and the outdoors, R.S. attended Texas A&M University where she majored in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation and minored in Park and Natural Resource Management. She worked for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for three years before leaving to pursue her dream of writing a novel.

She currently lives in the Big Bend region of Texas with her husband, two dogs, and cat. When she isn’t lost in another dimension creating havoc for her characters and stories, she enjoys mountain biking, exploring the desert, and eating way too much Mexican food.

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

Our November selection is Fair Play by Tove Jansson (translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal), a fascinating novel centered on the lives of two creative women.

Fairness and playfulness are at the heart of this delightful novel, which chronicles in 17 luminous snapshots a shared artistic life…. Jansson has a knack for packing a good deal of wit and wisdom into ostensibly simple tales. These deft and gentle stories are as refreshing as a dip in chilly Finnish seas. —The Guardian

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on November 5th.

Join us in celebrating the Austin launch of John Jodzio’s latest short story collection, Knockout. With readings from John, Kendra Fortmeyer, and Tatiana Ryckman.

Knockout is full of flawless portraits of the deeply flawed. A recovering drug addict gets tricked into stealing a tiger. A man buys a used sex chair from his neighbor. A woman suffering from agoraphobia raises her son completely indoors. Jodzio wonderfully steers these stories into deeper places, creating a brilliant examination of those on the fringes of modern life.

The absurd, darkly humorous Americana of Knockout shows Jodzio at his imaginative best.” —J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest

John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft McKnight Fellowship. His stories have appeared in a variety of places including This American Life, McSweeney’s, and One Story. He’s the author of three short story collections—the recently released Knockout (Soft Skull Press, 2016) as well as If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home and Get In If You Want To Live.

Kendra Fortmeyer likes to play in the genre divide. A Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Nonrequired Reading, One Story, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, Lightspeed and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from the New Writers Project at UT Austin, and recently attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ workshop in San Diego. Her debut magical realist YA novel, Hole in the Middle, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2017.

Tatiana Ryckman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of the chapbook story collection, Twenty-Something; managing editor of the Austin Review; and assistant editor at sunnyoutside press.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: two published authors will read from their work and there’ll be an audience Q & A. We’ll also 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: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night features two men of mystery! Ashish Malpani will read from Ten Days in October, a murder mystery set in a small town in rural India, and Michael Noll will read from his story that appeared in the latest Best American Mystery Stories.

Ashish Malpani is an Indian-American freelancer and blogger. Born in Sangamner, a small town in rural India, he spent much of his adult life in Austin, Texas. A technology product marketer by trade, Ashish earned his MSE from Purdue University and MBA from the University of Texas. Ashish fell in love with reading and traveling at a young age. As a kid he had two dreams in life: to write a novel and to travel around the world. Thirty eight countries and counting, Ashish has explored various cultures and captured the world through the lens of his camera with his wife Samta and son Ayan.

Michael Noll is the Program Director for the Writers’ League of Texas and editor of the craft-of-writing blog Read to Write Stories. His book, In the Beginning, Middle, and End: A Field Guide to Writing Fiction, will be published by A Strange Object in 2017. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Chattahoochee Review, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Indiana Review, and The New Territory. His story, “The Tank Yard,” is included in Best American Mystery Stories 2016.

Join us for an evening with writer and artist Eduardo Lalo, who will be reading from and signing his recent publications, Intemperie and Simone. Host César A. Salgado will also talk with Lalo about his books and the translation of his work into English. Please note that parts of this event will be conducted in Spanish.

An award-winning Puerto Rican writer, essayist, photographer, and visual artist, Eduardo Lalo is known for cross-genre books that express his passion for both words and images. Among his titles are La Isla Silente (2002), Los Pies De San Juan (2002), La Inutilidad (2004), Donde (2005), Los Países Invisibles (2008), El Deseo Del Lápiz (2010), Necrópolis (2014), and Intemperie (2016). In 2013 he won the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize for Simone (2011), now available in English from The University of Chicago Press. His visual work has been featured in numerous exhibitions. LLILAS Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin for Fall 2016, Lalo is currently teaching the graduate seminar Caribbean Poetics. Known for razor sharp columns in the island’s press, Lalo is today among the most outspoken and resolute critics of recurring colonialism in Puerto Rico and the world. 

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Join us for a reading with poets George Drew, Wendy Barker, and Barbara Ras.

George Drew was born in Mississippi and raised there and in New York State, where he currently lives. He is the author of seven collections, most recently Pastoral Habits: New & Selected Poems (2016), Down & Dirty (2015) and The View from Jackass Hill (2011, winner of the 2010 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize), all published by Texas Review Press. His eighth collection, Fancy’s Orphan, will be published in 2017 by Tiger Bark Press. George has published widely, with poems, reviews, and essays appearing in journals around the country. His work has also been anthologized, most recently in The Southern Poetry Anthology, II: Mississippi (Texas Review Press, 2010), Down to the Dark River: An Anthology of Poems About the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015), and The Great American Wise Ass Anthology (Lamar University Literary Press, 2016). George has won several awards, most recently the St. Petersburg Review poetry contest, and in 2010 his collection, American Cool, won that year’s Adirondack Literary Award for best poetry book of 2009. Pastoral Habits has been nominated by Texas Review Press for the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize.

Wendy Barker’s sixth collection of poetry, One Blackbird at a Time, received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry (BkMk Press, 2015). Her fourth chapbook is From the Moon, Earth is Blue (Wings Press, 2015). An anthology of poems about the 1960s, Far Out: Poems of the ’60s, co-edited with Dave Parsons, was released by Wings Press in 2016. Other books include a selection of poems with accompanying essays, Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co., 2002), and a selection of translations, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (co-translated with Saranindranath Tagore, Braziller, 2001). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2013.  She is the author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), as well as co-editor (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). Recipient of NEA and Rockefeller fellowships, she serves as poetry editor of Persimmon Tree: An Online Journal of the Arts for Women Over Sixty. She is the Pearl LeWinn Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982.

Barbara Ras is the author of three poetry collections: Bite Every Sorrow, which won the Walt Whitman Award and was also awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; One Hidden Stuff; and The Last Skin, winner of the Award for Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Ras has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.  Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, Five Points, American Scholar, Massachusetts Review, and Orion, as well as in many other magazines and anthologies.  She is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. Ras lives in San Antonio, where she directs Trinity University Press.

Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Readers include featured poet Carrie Fountain (pictured below), plus Dan Barton, Keith Fields, and Tori Sharpe.

Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review is a literary journal based in Austin, Texas that publishes poetry along with photographs, reviews, and essays.

Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review cover art: At the beach by New York-based artist Eli Slaydon

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Fuzzy Logic.” Featured artists include: HOPE RUIZ, URSULA PIKE, DAVID KENDALL, TERESA Y. ROBERSON and THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Valerie Hsiung’s third full-length poetry collection, efg (exchange following and gene flow): a trilogy (Action Books). Joining Hsiung as co-headlining readers for the evening will be Lisa Olstein, Dalton Day, and Taisia Kitaiskaia.

Valerie Hsiung is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: efg (exchange following and gene flow): a trilogy (Action Books, 2016), incantation inarticulate (O Balthazar Press, 2013), and under your face (O Balthazar Press, 2013). Her writing can be found in many places such as American Letters & Commentary, Cosmonauts Avenue, Denver Quarterly, New Delta Review, PEN Poetry Series, Prelude, RealPoetik, and VOLT, among elsewhere. She currently serves as an editor for Poor Claudia.

Lisa Olstein is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). A new book, Late Empire, is forthcoming in 2017. A winner of the Essay Press Prize, her chapbook, The Resemblance of the Enzymes of Grasses to those of Whales is a Family Resemblance was released this fall. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dalton Day is an MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at UT Austin and the author of two collections of poetry, Actual Cloud and Exit, Pursued, as well as several chapbooks, including To Breathe I’m Too Thin. His poems have been featured in Hobart, PANK, Everyday Genius, and Shabby Doll House, among others. He has a dog named Dot, who is the opposite of the crushing emotional weight that comes with being alive.

Taisia Kitaiskaia is the author of Literary Witches, a collaboration with illustrator Katy Horan (Seal Press 2017). She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Crazyhorse, Pleiades, jubilat, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Fence.

Join us for a reading from faculty members of Austin Community College’s Creative Writing program. With readings from W. Joe Hoppe, Irwin Tang, Vivé Griffith, Dunya Bean, and John Herndon (left to right, below).

W. Joe Hoppe’s poems have appeared in Analecta, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, and The Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. His poems have been anthologized in Stand Up Poetry, How to be This Man, gumballpoetry.com, and Beatest State in the Union. Joe’s one-of-a-kind poetry video, “$5200 MSTA,” has been shown at the Dallas Video Festival, San Antonio Underground Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, and VideoEx in Zurich, Switzerland. His books include a collection of short stories, Harmon Place (1991) from Primal Press, a poetry collection, Galvanized (2007), from Dalton Publishing, and a second poetry collection, Diamond Plate (2012), from Obsolete Press. Hoppe is the Poet Lariat of Austin’s intellectual variety show The Dionysium. He has hosted numerous poetry events at Austin’s Malvern Books, including interviews of local poets, a reading and discussion of Emily Dickinson, a communal performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl celebrating its 60th anniversary, and an annual memorial reading for the late, great Austin poet Albert Huffstickler. He is currently finishing up a four-year effort to get a customized ’51 Plymouth Cranbrook roadworthy for a trip down Route 66 in the summer of 2017. Hoppe is an Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.

Irwin Tang is a writer and activist. He is the principal author of Asian Texans: Our Histories and Our Lives and co-author of When Invisible Children Sing: a true story of five street children, an idealistic young doctor, and their dangerous hope. He is currently working on a documentary about how the goats are trouncing the sheep in Jesus’s war on hunger.

Vivé Griffith is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in The Sun, Oxford American, Gettysburg Review, and the Washington Post. She moved to Austin in 1999 and is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers. Since 2007 she has directed Free Minds, a program offering free college humanities classes to adults who have faced barriers to education. She teaches poetry workshops in the community to anyone who asks.

Currently an adjunct professor of creative writing at Austin Community College, Dunya Bean received the master of fine arts from The University of Texas at El Paso—on the border, la frontera—between Texas and Mexico. Her thesis and novel about two sisters divided by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution got a second place and a trip to receive the Robie McCauley Prize at Castle Weil in the Netherlands. A stint as a writer-in-residence at the Ucross Foundation’s Clearmont, Wyoming location led to her current novel, Preacher Man, using Walter Prescott Webb’s book The Great Plains that divides the country at the 38^th meridian and In Preacher Man, how morality plays out during drought, sin among ranchers, farmers and others in West Texas. Short stories have landed in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals; and Bean’s short video, “Looking for the Light, Listening for the Sound,” showed at SXSW in March, 2012. 

John Herndon is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. He has published seven books of poetry, and his first novel, One Too Many, was published in 2016. His first feature film as writer and producer, Frame Switch, is currently available on Amazon, and his screenplay has been nominated for Best Original Screenplay for a Feature Film at international film festivals in Berlin and Milan. He teaches writing and literature at Austin Community College.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of Dos Gatos Press’ most recent anthology, Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, edited by Scott Wiggerman and Cindy Huyser with a foreword by Dr. Carmen Tafolla. With readings from Anjela Ratliff, C. Samuel Rees, Charlotte Renk, Christa Pandey, Cindy Huyser, Cyra Dumitru, Gloria Amescua, Gordon Magill, Katherine Oldmixon, Leticia Urieta, Lucy Griffith, Lyman Grant, Lynn Reynolds, Sandi Stromberg, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell, Barbara Randals Gregg, and Scott Wiggerman.

This reading will feature poets from Austin and across the state reading their own work and others’ from this acclaimed anthology. The second in a series of anthologies of poetry of the Southwest by Albuquerque-based Dos Gatos Press, Bearing the Mask presents a diverse collection of personae from before European contact to the present, from the historical to the mythical, and from the famous to the obscure, woven together to form a vibrant, complex history.

About Bearing the Mask:

To quote from the foreword by Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla, “The range of voices here is as beautiful and translucent as a rainbow. From Cochise to Calamity Jane, Navaho Code Talkers to Japanese internees, Devil Girl and Old Man Gloom, slaves and stunt pilots, Paiutes and migrant mothers, Annie Oakley and Georgia O’Keeffe, security officers and French tourists, Gregorio Cortez, La Llorona, and Cynthia Ann Parker—all come to life here, speak their own truths and their own sacred space in these poems.”

Bearing the Mask offers rich perspectives on life in the Southwest, garnering praise in reader reviews that call it “fascinating” and “an amazing book for poetry and history lovers.”

Photo, L-R: Anjela Ratliff, C. Samuel Rees, Charlotte Renk, Christa Pandey, Cindy Huyser

Anjela Villarreal Ratliff’s poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga; The Enigmatist; Blue Hole; Texas Poetry Calendar; di-vêrsé-city; Australian Latino Press; Boundless 2016; Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems; Ribbons Anthology; and forthcoming in Chachalaca Review; Pilgrimage Magazine; and The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop. Anjela is also a writing workshop presenter for youth and adults. A native Tejana, she was raised in southern California, but has resided in Austin since 1990.

C. Samuel Rees is an alumnus of Loyola University of Maryland’s writing program. He has been published in Fairy Tale Review, JMWW, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and in the Texas Poetry Calendar. He lives in Austin, Texas where he writes poetry, fiction, and works as a high school teacher.

Charlotte Renk‘s poetry has appeared in journals such as Kalliope, Concho River Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Southwest Review, and Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, as well as in anthologies such as The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas, and Her Texas. She has also published three books of poetry— These Holy Hungers: Secret Yearnings from an Empty Cup, Solidago: An Altar to Weeds, and The Tenderest Petal Hears (co-winner, 2014 Blue Horse Press Chapbook Award).

Christa Pandey has been widely published since she moved to Austin. As German immigrant herself she became interested in the immigration saga of the 19th century. Her poems are collected in three chapbooks (Southern Seasons, Maya, and Hummingbird Wings), while individual poems can be found in the Texas Poetry Calendar, the Poetry@Round Top Anthology, Naugatuck River Review and online at Silver Birch Press.

Cindy Huyser has worked with Dos Gatos Press as an editor since 2008. Her chapbook, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems, was named co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook contest. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, The Nassau Review, Untameable City, and the Texas Poetry Calendar, which she co-edited from 2009 – 2014.

Photo, L-R: Cyra Dumitru, Gloria Amescua, Gordon Magill, Katherine Oldmixon, Leticia Urieta

Cyra S. Dumitru is a teacher of poetry writing, writing as healing and of college composition, and is certified in Poetic Medicine through The Institute of Poetic Medicine. She facilitates individual and small group healing through writing circles in a variety of community settings. She has three book-length collections of her poems: What the Body Knows, Listening to Light, and remains.

Gloria Amescua, a CantoMundo fellow and Hedgebrook alumna, is the author of two chapbooks, Windchimes and What Remains. Amescua has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including di-verse-city, Kweli Journal, the Texas Poetry Calendar, The Acentos Review, Toe Good Poetry, Pilgrimage Magazine, and Elsewhere Lit. She has also received the Austin Poetry Society Award and the Christina Sergeyenvna Award.

Gordon Magill is a journalist, writing teacher, exhibit writer, freelancer, and poet. He has worked at The Washington Evening Star and Washington Post in Washington DC, taught writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, as well as in public high school, and has written about two hundred published articles and short stories. Recently Gordon’s poetry has been published in The Enigmatist and Blue Hole.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon’s recent poems appear in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets, Lifting the Sky, Texas Poetry Calendar, and in her chapbook Water Signs. Katherine co-directs the Poetry at Round Top festival, is a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and professor and chair of English at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, TX.

Leticia Urieta is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and a fiction candidate in the MFA program at Texas State University, where she is a graduate teaching assistant and the blog editor for Front Porch Journal. She is currently working as an educator in the community with a focus on equity in the pedagogy of writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets, St. Sucia Zine and BorderSenses. Leticia lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two dogs. She is currently at work on a short story collection and her first novel about the role of Mexican soldaderas in Texas’ war with Mexico.

Photo, L-R: Lucy Griffith, Lyman Grant, Lynn Reynolds, Sandi Stromberg, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell

Lucy Griffith is a poet and essayist who lives on a ranch along the Guadalupe River near Comfort, Texas. She is a Certified Master Naturalist as well as a licensed psychologist.
She is a member of the Texas Writer’s League and has been published monthly in The Texas Star and various psychology journals. Her muse is a tractor named Ruby and a good day is one spent outside.

Lyman Grant teaches creative writing, English, and humanities at Austin Community College. He is married and the proud father of three sons. A poet since high school, he has a big pile of poems, some of them collected in four books and one chapbook. The most recent is Last Work: A Meditation on the Final Paintings of Neal Adams.

Lynn Reynolds wrote many poems while a member of the Houston Poetry Society, the Texas Poetry Society and Poets, Ink. She read at the 2012 Houston Poetry Fest and has now been published in From Hide and Horn: A Sesquicentennial Anthology of Texas Poets, the Texas Poetry Calendar, and Untameable City.

Sandi Stromberg was guest editor of Mutabilis Press’ latest poetry anthology, Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Red River Review, Illya’s Honey, and Colere, among others, as well as in the anthologies TimeSlice, The Weight of Addition, and Improbable Worlds, Crossing Lines, Goodbye, Mexico, Civilized Beasts, and is upcoming in Texas Weather Anthology. She has been a juried poet in the Houston Poetry Fest eight times.

Vanessa Zimmer-Powell was the winner of a Rick Steves Haiku Award, and was a poetry award winner at the 2013 Austin International Poetry Fest. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Weekly Avocet, Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Ekphrasis, Untameable City, the Texas Poetry Calendar, San Pedro River Review, The Chaffey Review, and Copperfield Review.

Photo, L-R: Barbara Randals Gregg, Scott Wiggerman

Barbara Randals Gregg has poetry in di-verse-city, The Enigmatist, Blue Hole, the Austin Poetry Society’s Best Austin Poetry anthology, Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga, and several editions of Texas Poetry Calendar. She currently serves as Austin Poetry Society President.

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and an editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky, Wingbeats II, and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems. Recent poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Red Earth Review, Pinyon Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the anthologies This Assignment Is So Gay, Forgetting Home: Poems about Alzheimer’s, and The Great Gatsby Anthology. He is an editor for Dos Gatos Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

We’re delighted to be hosting a reading to celebrate the launch of Small Packages, the debut anthology of stories, poetry and prose from Austin’s Writers Workshop. Readers include poets Kara Bell, Laurie Cosbey and A.M. Lewin, novelist Ron Seybold, plus Holly Lorka, Karen Hoffman, Merry Klonower, Hadley Hill, and Emily Weaver.

Join us for a celebration hosted by Pterodáctilo, the bilingual journal and blog run by graduate students in UT Austin’s department of Spanish and Portuguese. This bilingual event will feature poetry readings… and tamales!

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

Our December selection is Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter (translated from the German by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore), a Christmas story of almost unendurable suspense. Thomas Mann claimed Rock Crystal has “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature.”

Two children—Conrad and his little sister, Sanna—set out from their village high up in the Alps to visit their grandparents in the neighboring valley. It is the day before Christmas but the weather is mild, though of course night falls early in December and the children are warned not to linger. The grandparents welcome the children with presents and pack them off with kisses. Then snow begins to fall, ever more thickly and steadily. Undaunted, the children press on, only to take a wrong turn. The snow rises higher and higher, time passes: it is deep night when the sky clears and Conrad and Sanna discover themselves out on a glacier, terrifying and beautiful, the heart of the void.

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on December 3rd.