Malvern Books

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.

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.

Join us in celebrating the launch of the Vision + Voice Anthology. Featuring readings by winning and honorable-mention poets, a poster exhibit, and refreshments!

Vision + Voice is a collaboration between Austin Community College and Austin Independent School District that promotes literacy and creative expression by combining artwork from ACC students with poetry from AISD students.

Join us for a meeting of the Boomertime Book Club!

The Boomertime Book Club aims to read all types of books, fiction and nonfiction. We select the book to be read at a meeting and then discuss it at the next meeting. We meet monthly. We limit attendance at each meeting to  no more than twelve in order to encourage participation by all. Attendance is first come, first served. We encourage guests and encourage new membership within the Meetup Boomertime social group. For more information, please email Greg Smith at greg02390239@gmail.com.

Boomertime is a Meetup group for babyboomers (ages 50+). Its purpose is to provide opportunities for Austin adults to have fun and meet new people. Boomertime is a group where individuals can make friends and can plan events around their special interests for all to participate in. Boomers dance, hike, read, talk, laugh, and engage in many more activities.

Join us in celebrating the release of the Fall 2016 edition of Austin Community College’s journal, The Rio Review. Students featured in this issue will share their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork with us. Sponsored by the Creative Writing Department.

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

This month’s Novel Night has a SciFi/Fantasy/Speculative twist, and features a trifecta of talented writers: Amanda Downum, Marshall Ryan Maresca, and Yasser Bahjatt (left to right, below).

Amanda Downum is the author of the Necromancer Chronicles—The Drowning City, The Bone Palace, and Kingdoms of Dust—published by Orbit Books, and Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, from Solaris. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and elsewhere. She lives in Austin, TX. Her day job sometimes involves dressing up as a giant worm.

Marshall Ryan Maresca is a fantasy and science-fiction writer, as well as a playwright, living in South Austin with his wife and son. He is the author of the Maradaine Novels: The Thorn of Dentonhill, A Murder of Mages, The Alchemy of Chaos, An Import of Intrigue and the upcoming Holver Alley Crew. His work also appeared in the Norton Hint Fiction anthology and Rick Klaw’s anthology Rayguns Over Texas. He has also had several short plays produced.

Yasser Bahjatt is a US-born author, translator, software developer, entrepreneur, and co founder of Yatakhayaloon: The League of Arabic SciFiers, as well as the co-founder of ARIA (Autonomous Roadless Intelligent Array) Logistics. He holds a BA in Computer Engineering, completed Cambridge University’s MOSAIC leadership and management program in the United Kingdom, and was the first Saudi graduate of Singularity University (SU) in Silicon Valley, CA, where he founded Matternet, a project which aims to alleviate poverty and accelerate growth through roadless transportation networks. Bahjatt manages business development at Quad Dimensions Tech, owns and manages E2T (the leading eSports company of Saudi Arabia) and data networking provider Intelligent Networks’ Components (INC, Saudi Arabia’s first local internet gaming service), and promotes innovations in eSports by serving as president of the Electronic Sports International Federation (eSIF). Bahjatt was the first to translate TED talks into Arabic; he translates for TED conferences worldwide. He is the author of Yaqteena: The Old World (2015), the first installment and English translation of his SciFi novel series, which explore an alternate historical timeline in which major historical events left Islamic society untouched. Bahjatt co-authored and translated the Saudi Arabia best-selling novel HWJN.

Rebecca Liu is the recipient of fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers and the Stadler Center for Poetry. Her recent poems can be found in Boston Review, VOLT, Web Conjunctions, The Awl, Phantom Limb and Gulf Coast.

For nineteen years, the Austin reading for the Texas Poetry Calendar has been the culmination of the fall calendar readings for Dos Gatos Press. This year’s reading will feature poets sharing Texas-related work, including their poems from the 2017 Texas Poetry Calendar (edited by Wade Martin and Allyson Whipple).

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 “Tangled Webs.” The lineup of web-spinners is BIRDMAN 313, DAVID KENDALL, ARALYN HUGHES, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, & 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.

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. This month is our special annual holiday edition! Ugly sweaters strongly encouraged!

Featuring young women writers from the Austin community, this month’s I Screamers are Aimee Mackovic, Sequoia Maner, Mónica Teresa Ortiz, and Amanda Johnston

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.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

Malvern Books will also be having its annual holiday gift card promotion: Get a free $10 gift card with every $50 purchase. They make great stocking stuffers!

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

“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 Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s debut poetry collection, Images of Radical Politics (Rescue Press). With readings from Vanessa, Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Ryan Bender Murphy, and Kimberly Lambright.

Vanessa Jimenez Gabb (above left) is the author of Images for Radical Politics (above right), which was the Editor’s Choice in the 2015 Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize contest; and the chapbooks midnight blue (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Weekend Poems (dancing girl press, 2014). Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in TimeOut New York, jubilat, Brooklyn Poets, VIDA Women in Literary Arts, Sixth Finch, Word Riot, The Atlas Review, Big Lucks, among other places. She received her MFA in Poetry from CUNY Brooklyn College and is from and lives in Brooklyn.

Emily Bludworth de Barrios is the author of Splendor, a book of poems from H_NGM_N Books. She’s also published two chapbooks: Women, Money, Children, Ghosts, from Sixth Finch, and Extraordinary Power, from Factory Hollow Press. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Jellyfish, New Delta Review, Sixth Finch, and Tender. Emily was born in Houston and raised in Egypt, the United States, and Venezuela; she currently lives in Houston.

Ryan Bender Murphy‘s chapbook, First Man on Mars, was published by Phantom Books in 2013. His other work has recently been published in Better, The Boiler, Cartridge Lit, Country Music, Deluge, Everyday Genius, and Hobart. He has started a journal called Hardly Doughnuts.

Kimberly Lambright studied critical theory at NYU and creative writing at Eastern Washington University. Her debut poetry collection, Ultra-Cabin, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. She is a MacDowell fellow, and her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Columbia Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, Bone Bouquet, The Boiler, Wicked Alice, Big Bridge, and The Burnside Review. She lives in Austin and is at work on her second book, Doom Glove.

Join us for an evening with poets Micah Bateman, Katy Chrisler, and Paula Cisewski (left to right, below).

Micah Bateman is the author of a chapbook, Polis, from The Catenary Press. He is the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been anthologized in New Poetry from the Midwest; The Poet’s Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Faith, Doubt, and Wonder; and Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. He is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Texas-Austin, where he works as an editor on the online Walt Whitman Archive.

Katy Chrisler received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held residencies with the Land Arts of the American West program and 100 West Corsicana. Recent work of hers has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Octopus Magazine, The Volta, LVNG and The Seattle Review. She currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Paula Cisewski’s third poetry collection, The Threatened Everything, will be released in 2016 through Burnside Review Books. Her other books include Ghost Fargo (selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize), Upon Arrival (Black Ocean), and the lyric prose chapbook Misplaced Sinister. She has been awarded fellowships from the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She teaches, both academically and privately, and curates artful literary events in the Twin Cities, sometimes in a tiny fort. 

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 January selection is Loving by Henry Green. Set in the vast hereditary house of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, Loving explores the deeply precarious nature of ordinary life against the background of the larger world at war.

Loving is a classic upstairs-downstairs story, with the emphasis on downstairs…Green’s generosity towards even the most scheming and rascally of them offers a lesson you never forget.

—Richard Lacayo, Time

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 January 7th.

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 “Spiritual Renewal.” Our featured artists are: BIRDMAN 313, URSULA PIKE, REBECCA M. RAPHAEL, BRIAN PRIOLEAU, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, DAVID KENDALL, BRIAN GROSZ, & THOM THE WORLD POET. Ring in the New Year with soul-fulfilling spoken word and poetry! 

Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night features Larry Barkley (writing as Martin Barkley) and John Pipkin. Martin Barkley will be reading from his newly released story collection/novella, The Lovesong of Smith Oliver Smith, and John Pipkin will be reading from his recent release, The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter.

Martin Barkley’s fiction, poetry and reviews have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Texas Observer, Arcadia Press, Work Literary Magazine, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse. He lives in Austin, Texas.

John Pipkin’s first novel, Woodsburner, was published to national acclaim by Doubleday in 2009. Woodsburner won the New York Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Massachusetts Center for the Book Novel Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Stephen Turner Prize for First Novel. His new historical novel, The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. John was the Dobie Paisano Fellow at UT-Austin for the spring of 2011, and he recently returned from a three-week writing fellowship at the MacDowell Artist’s Colony in New Hampshire. Currently, John is the Writer-in-Residence at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and he also teaches at UT-Austin and in the Low-residency MFA Program at Spalding University in Louisville, KY.

“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.

On January 15th poets across the country will gather to voice their fears and concerns about a Trump Presidency. Join us at Malvern Books for the Austin event, organized by Justin Booth in association with the Chicon Street Poets. Nationwide, Poets Protest Against Trump is organized by Alan Kaufman, editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and Michael Rothernberg, co-founder of 100 Thousand Poets For Change.

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 for a reading from Michael Bunker and Forbes West.

Michael Bunker is a USA Today Bestselling author, off-gridder, husband, and father of four children. He lives with his family in a “plain” community in Central Texas, where he reads and writes books… and occasionally tilts at windmills. In November of 2015, Variety Magazine announced that Michael had sold a film/TV option for his bestselling novel Pennsylvania to Jorgensen Pictures. JP is currently developing Pennsylvania for production into a feature film or Television series.

Forbes West was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois and graduated with a Master’s Degree in Political Science from California State University, Long Beach. He currently lives and works mostly in San Francisco and owns a home in Ojima, Japan—a village five hours south of Tokyo by car that is in the foothills of Mt. Fuji.

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, Malvern’s Multi-Verse features 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 will be hosted by our Curmudgeon in Chief, Joe Bratcher, and will feature readings and discussion with Thom the World Poet (pictured at right).

Thom is an improvising versifier in the Bardic tradition. He works with musicians of various persuasions, including Gong, Kangaroo Moon, and Invisible Opera Company of Tibet. He also publishes books which now number 253. He has hosted EXPRESSIONS for the last twenty years, and supports open mics and Poetry Festivals. He is a co-founder of the Austin International Poetry Festival.

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.

This month’s I Screamers are Micah Ruelle, Marilyse V. Figueroa, and Leticia Urieta.

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.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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 The Entropy of Rocketman, a new collection of poems by Rita Anderson. Rita will be joined by writer Ray Shea.

The Entropy of Rocketman aligns the seasons of the heart with the four elements to take us on a tour de force through profound moments of joy, grief, and into the “in-between-ness of things” where humanity is reflected in stars that disappear.

“A classic lyric terrain of desire and loss creates the ground for the taut, smart poems in Rita Anderson’s The Entropy of Rocketman. With droll irony, Anderson describes love as a ‘noble gas’ (to be specific, the radioactive Uranium 238!), at once volatile and seductive; contemplates the ‘ancient need for more’; and returning imaginatively to explore the ‘old house’ (now empty but ‘still intact’) that love built, asks in a moment of wry paradox, ‘What if the undrawn line is the truest parameter, / one we cannot erase but would never cross?’ These poems shimmer with clarity, the deep and hard-won emotional wisdom that limns this brilliant collection.” —Cynthia Hogue, director, Creative Writing Program at ASU 

Rita Anderson, a member of Poets & Writers, the Academy of American Poets, ICWP, and ScriptWorks, has a MFA Creative Writing and a MA Playwriting. A published and award-winning playwright and poet, Rita went on scholarship to The O’Neill. Her play, Frantic is the Carousel, was the 2013 National Partners American Theatre nominee, when she won the Kennedy Center’s Ken Ludwig Playwriting Award for “best body of work.” She’s had numerous productions to include NYC, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Detroit, Cincinnati—and in London, England and Paris, France. Early Liberty, internationally published at www.offthewallplays.com, is on their “Best Selling Plays” list. Rita was poetry editor of the literary journal at University of New Orleans. She won the Houston Poetry Festival, the Gerreighty Prize, the Robert F. Gibbons Poetry Award, the Cheyney Award, and an award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, EVENT Magazine (British Columbia), Blue Heron Review, Ellipsis, The Longleaf Pine (Midwood Press), DLC Literary Journal, Cahoodaloodaling, The Blueshift Journal, Blotterature, Words Work, Transcendence, PHIction, Persona (50^th Anniversary Edition), The Artful Mind, Di-Verse-City: An Austin Poetry Anthology, Inflight Magazine (Paper Plane Pilots Publishing), The Stardust Gazette, and Explorations. 

Ray Shea’s writing has appeared in The Southeast Review, Sundog Lit, The Austin Review, Hobart, Phoebe and elsewhere. He is a frequent contributor to The Rumpus and is Memoir Editor at Split Lip Magazine. A native of Boston and New Orleans, he lives in Austin.

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 February selection is Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy, translated from the Hungarian by John Bátki. In Sunflower, a young woman leaves the city and returns to her country estate to escape the memory of her desperate love for an unscrupulous charmer. The plot twists and turns; elemental myth mingles with sheer farce: Krúdy brilliantly illuminates the shifting contours of the landscape of desire.

Krudy writes of imaginary people, of imaginary events, in dream-like settings; but the spiritual essence of his persons and of their places is stunningly real, it reverberates in our minds and strikes at our hearts.
— John Lukacs, The New Yorker

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 February 4th.

Join Austin indie romance authors Cate Lawley, Regina Morris, and Kay Manis (left to right, below), as they read selections from their works and discuss how they made the leap to indie publishing.

Cate Lawley is the pen name for Kate Baray’s sweet romances and cozy mysteries, including The Goode Witch Matchmaker and Vegan Vamp series. She writes and lives in Austin, Texas (where many of her stories take place) with her pack of pointers and hounds. Cate has worked as an attorney, a manager, a tractor sales person, and a dog trainer, but writing is the hands-down winner. When she’s not tapping away at her keyboard or in deep contemplation of her next fanciful writing project, she’s sweeping up hairy dust bunnies and watching British mysteries. Cate also writes paranormal (Lost Library) and urban fantasy (Spirelli) as Kate Baray and thrillers (Beauregard) as K.D. Baray. 

Regina Morris writes sensual and suspenseful paranormal romances about a covert team of vampires who protect the President of the United States. She also writes contemporary romances and fantasy/time-travel. She’s a software engineer by day, and writer by night and on weekends. Writing is her passion and tea and chocolate fuel her so she can write late into the night.

Kay Manis is a funny chick who’s sprinkled with a little crazy on top. Okay, let’s be honest… there’s ALOTTA crazy up there. She writes books filled with passion, promise and purpose (with laughter and a few tears, but always an HEA). She is a native Texan and lives with her family in Austin. When not reading or writing, you’ll find Kay eating out with friends or napping with her favorite pillow (stolen from an Inn in Vermont—true story). 

Join us for a meeting of the Boomertime Book Club! This month they will be reading Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand.

The Boomertime Book Club aims to read all types of books, fiction and nonfiction. We select the book to be read at a meeting and then discuss it at the next meeting. We meet monthly. We limit attendance at each meeting to  no more than twelve in order to encourage participation by all. Attendance is first come, first served. We encourage guests and encourage new membership within the Meetup Boomertime social group. For more information, please email Greg Smith at greg02390239@gmail.com.

Boomertime is a Meetup group for babyboomers (ages 50+). Its purpose is to provide opportunities for Austin adults to have fun and meet new people. Boomertime is a group where individuals can make friends and can plan events around their special interests for all to participate in. Boomers dance, hike, read, talk, laugh, and engage in many more activities.

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 books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night focuses on works of historical fiction and features S.D. Banks and Sugar Lee Ryder. S.D. will be reading from Transcendent Loyalties: A Novel of the American Revolution, and Sugar Lee will be reading from The Gaslight Gunslinger, book one of her Matthew Slade Western detective series.

S.D. Banks is a native Texan, and a long-time resident of Austin. For much of Banks’ adult life, her focus was on her husband, son and working at paying jobs. It was when she went back to college later in life to complete a degree that had been put on hold that encouragement from history and English professors convinced her that she should rekindle her writing dream, and pointed her toward a melding of her passion for history and love of writing. Banks graduated summa cum laude from Texas State University where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in history, with a minor in writing. She credits her history professors there with demonstrating that an understanding of history can give us the key we need to understand the present. “Many of the trials, conflicts, and dilemmas we face today are either continuations of situations that have gone on for centuries, or are so similar to past events that the relevance of the parallels cannot be ignored,” she says. “Knowing these things—understanding the ramifications of how they played out in the past—can keep us as a society from being manipulated or misled, and can help make us as individuals better citizens and wiser voters.” Banks adds what is essentially her mission statement. “If, through my novels, I can impart a few nuggets of historical knowledge in an entertaining way, then I feel I’ve been successful.”

Sugar Lee Ryder was born to a pair of Wild West rodeo show performers. It made for an interesting time growing up, to put it mildly. She lives in Austin, Texas. Her books include the bestselling contemporary romance Cowgirl Up, the lesbian-themed historical romance Sagebrush & Lace, and two western detective series—The Gaslight Gunslinger and Maddie Slade.

Join us for an evening with poets Michael McLaughlin and mónica teresa ortiz. Michael will be reading from his most recent collection of poetry, Countless Cinemas. 

Michael McLaughlin is both a restless and weary traveler. Countless Cinemas thoughtfully explores the difficulty of genuine connection in the midst of our everyday struggles. McLaughlin’s poetic sensibility is vivid and engaging, his aesthetic dynamic and visceral. He unflinchingly examines the subjectivity of our experience, offering readers “a universe of closet-sized cinemas / each occupied by a single person / eternally viewing a different film.

A three-time California Arts Council grant recipient, Michael McLaughlin has worked for twenty-six years as an Artist-in-Residence at Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum security forensic facility, as a Contract Artist with the California Department of Corrections and as San Luis Obispo County Area Coordinator for California Poets in the Schools. Founding editor of USC’s Southern California Anthology, Michael  McLaughlin has written two novels, Western People Show Their Faces and Gang of One. His third and most recent collection of poetry, Countless Cinemas (University of Hell Press, Portland, Oregon) came out last March. Originally from San Francisco, McLaughlin currently lives on the central California coast with his brilliant and beautiful wife. Selected Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo county in 2003, he runs Santa Marias’ Live from the CORE poetry/performance series and is an Artist in Residence at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California.

mónica teresa ortiz was born and raised in Texas. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Borderlands, the Texas Observer, Black Girl Dangerous, and elsewhere. A two-time Andres Montoya Letras Latinas Poetry Prize finalist, ortiz is the poetry editor for Raspa Magazine, a queer Latino literary art journal.

“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 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 “Romance & Other Patriarchal Fantasies.” Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for a reading from visiting poet Bruce Willard, who will be sharing work from his most recent collection, Violent Blues (Four Way Books). Bruce will be joined by poet Joe Brundidge.

Violent Blues is a blues-harp album of words, a soundtrack of loss, introspection and renewal—one man’s search for intimacy and enduring music. Its poems are rooted in the natural world and tethered by concrete experience.

Bruce Willard’s poems have appeared in 5 A.M., African American Review, Agni online, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Salamander, NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, and numerous other publications. His first collection of poems, Holding Ground, was published by Four Way Books in 2013. Willard is a graduate of Middlebury College and holds a MFA from Bennington College’s Writing Seminars program. He spends his time in Maine, Colorado, and California. In addition to his work as a poet, Willard currently runs 32 Bar Blues and oversees several other clothing businesses.

Joe Brundidge is an author, host, and public speaker living in Austin, Texas. He has hosted a number of open mics for almost 20 years to include his own show, “Spoken&Heard” at Kick Butt Coffee. He also served as the Director of the Austin International Poetry Festival for three years, from 2012-2015. He is currently co-host of KOOP 91.7fm’s “Writing On The Air.”

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 for an afternoon with poets Ginny Wiehardt, Julie Poole, and Drea Brown.

Ginny Wiehardt’s chapbook Migration won the 2016 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Southern Humanities Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Willow Springs. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and Jentel. Originally from Texas, she now lives in New York, NY with her family.

Julie Poole is a poetry MFA candidate in the New Writers’ Project at the University of Texas. She received a BA from Columbia University. Currently living in Austin, she runs writing workshops for people with dementia, as a teaching artist for the Austin Public Library. She is the co-founder and editor of a poetry publication called BRIDGE, which can be found at Malvern Books and independent bookstores elsewhere. 

Drea Brown’s work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, such as Southern Indiana Review and Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, and winner of the 2014 Gold Line chapbook contest, her chapbook dear girl: a reckoning was published in 2015. Drea is currently a PhD candidate in African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin.

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. This month we’ll be celebrating the best kind of love there is: the love of your girl gang! And our I Screamers are FT Kola, Katrina Goudey, and Laura Kraay.

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.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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 G F Harper’s first full-length book of poetry, Savage Yard. With readings from G F Harper, Jenna Martin Opperman, and Jim Trainer.

In Savage Yard, G F Harper (above) employs a poetic prose that explores the bewilderment of the human condition. The work is brutally unromantic with glints of hope; often driven by a distinctive dark humor. Harper’s work contemplates common world themes such as roads, travels, and transformation. The images are crisp and ready to be enjoyed.

G F Harper is a writer, painter, and curator for the poetry collective, Chicon Street Poets, based in Austin, Texas. Harper attended Saint Edward’s University for a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature with a specialization in Creative Writing, minor in Psychology. Harper also has an Associate of Arts in English from Austin Community College. His work has been published in La Bloga: On-line Floricanto (2016, California), Raw Paw: Alien (2015, Austin, Texas), Dark Lady Poetry (2012, Los Angeles, California), Refined Savage Poetry Review (2008, USA), Farmhouse Magazine (2009, NYC, NY). Savage Yard is his first full-length book of poetry. Harper currently resides in Austin, Texas. He enjoys painting, traveling, and hiking in his spare time.

Jenna Martin Opperman has a BA in English Literature from The University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Despite being published in a wide variety of poetry journals and magazines, she prefers the thrill and terror of performing before a live audience. She works and plays with the printed word every day as an English teacher, as the owner of Red Planet Audiobooks, and as the co-founder of INF Press. Her poetry comes from a place of ferocity, of playfulness, of emotional urgency, and of hope. She loves whisky, revelation, and naps.

All in the wind, Jim Trainer’s third full-length collection of poetry and prose, is out now through Yellow Lark Press. Trainer lives in Austin, performing as a singer songwriter and serving as curator of Going For The Throat, a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance.  

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, Malvern’s Multi-Verse features 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 we learn more about Pen2Paper, a disability-focused creative writing competition. Pen2Paper gives writers with disabilities a forum where they can share their work and brings awareness to disability issues through the arts. Pen2Paper also challenges all Texans of all ages to think, rethink, and express their stories, perspectives, fears, and discoveries about disability.

The Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest calls upon established writers, novice writers, and writers who don’t yet know they ARE writers to enter pieces of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and graphic narratives to the competition. Each year, entries are evaluated by a panel of volunteer judges, and prizes are awarded to the top entries in each category. Winners and selected honorable mentions are posted to Pen2Paper’s website. Local and state sponsors and volunteers help make the competition possible by contributing their time, expertise, products, services, and energy.

Join us for a night of poetry to celebrate the kick-off of Mathias Svalina’s Dream Delivery Service in Austin. With the Dream Delivery Service, Svalina takes subscribers and writes dreams for them every day for a month. The dreams consist of brief prose-poems or flash-fiction. For subscribers in Austin, Svalina will bike around before dawn and deliver dreams every day from 3/5-4/5, leaving them on subscriber’s front doors. For subscribers out of town he will mail the dreams every day. In 2016 and 2017 Svalina is traveling around the country doing the Dream Delivery Service in various cities: Denver, Richmond, Tucson, Marfa, Austin, Chicago, and maybe more. 

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 March selection is The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes. First published in 1963, The Expendable Man upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.

The Expendable Man is one of the great trick novels of crime fiction. Yet to call it that is to belittle it. Its trick is no clever, superimposed bit of literary legerdemain: it is integral to the whole conception of the book. . . . A fine achievement. —H.R.F. Keating, Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best 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 March 4th.

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 books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night features Brittani Sonnenberg and Adeena Reitberger. Brittani will read from her novel Home Leave, which filmmaker Wim Wenders called “a captivating tour de force that follows a nomadic family across generations and continents.” Adeena will share with us some of her short fiction.

Brittani Sonnenberg (above left) is the author of the novel Home Leave, selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She was raised across three continents and has worked as a journalist in Germany, China, and throughout Southeast Asia. A graduate of Harvard, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her fiction has been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories as well as Ploughshares, Short Fiction, and Asymptote. Her nonfiction has appeared in Time, Associated Press, Hairpin, and NPR Berlin. She is a freelance editor and writer for Tribeza Magazine and a visiting creative writing instructor and thesis advisor at Hong Kong University’s MFA Program.

Adeena Reitberger (above right) is a writer, editor, and teacher in Austin, Texas. Her stories and essays have been published in magazines like Mississippi Review, Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Black Warrior Review, Sierra Nevada Review, NANO Fiction, and elsewhere, and her essay “Here Is Always Somewhere Else” was listed as a notable in Best American Essays. She is the coeditor of American Short Fiction, an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Austin Community College, and an advisory board member of Conflict of Interest.

“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 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 “Survival 101.” Our featured performers include: YESHUA UDELLE, DONNA DECHEN BIRDWELL, HOPE RUIZ, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, BRIAN GROSZ, and 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.

You’re already familiar with our NYRB Classics Bookclub, in which we read and discuss classic works of fiction… now we’d like to invite you to join The Other Book Club, a brand-new reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from the “Other” section of our store.

Our recently expanded “Other” collection includes ever so eclectic essays, plays, creative non-fiction, memoirs and more. Featuring books like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travels through the Greek islands and the political tracts of Simone Weil—and let’s not forget Oskar Panizza’s blasphemous essay on the history of the pig!—our non-fiction section is as unusual as the rest of our store.

Our first book will be Patti Smith’s Woolgathering, a small and sublime memoir of her childhood and a moving exploration of her beginnings as an artist.

Capturing moments of her adult life, Smith pares down her prose to a state of vivid impressionism, so enigmatic that even ordinary acts take on spiritual weight. —The Guardian

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 Saturday, March 18th, at 12pm for the inaugural meeting of The Other Book Club.

Please join us at Malvern Books for Fantastical Fictions, an odd-monthly event focusing on the literary fantastic across genres and cultures. This month host Rebecca Schwarz will discuss the novel Chocky by pioneering science-fiction master John Wyndham.

Worth noting: if you buy Chocky for the discussion, you’ll get 10% off the list price!

In Chocky, Wyndham takes on an enigma as strange as anything found in his classic works The Day of the Triffids or The Chrysalids—the mind of a child. It’s not terribly unusual for a boy to have an imaginary friend, but Matthew’s parents have to agree that his—nicknamed Chocky—is anything but ordinary. Why, Chocky demands to know, are there twenty-four hours in a day? Why are there two sexes? Why can’t Matthew solve his math homework using a logical system like binary code? When the questions Chocky asks become too advanced and, frankly, too odd for Matthew’s teachers to answer, his parents start to wonder if Chocky might be something far stranger than a figment of their son’s imagination.

Chocky, the last novel Wyndham published during his life, is a playful investigation of what being human is all about, delving into such matters as child-rearing, marriage, learning, artistic inspiration—and it ends with a surprising and impassioned plea for better human stewardship of the earth.

John Wyndham (1903–1969) was the pen name used by the British science-fiction writer John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris. He began writing for money in 1925, mostly for American periodicals. After working as a government official and corporal operator in the army during World War II, he began writing science-fiction novels. His many works include The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken, The Midwich Cuckoos, Trouble with Lichen, Web, and The Chrysalids (NYRB Classics).

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. This month’s I Screamers are Heather Lefebvre, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Julie Kantor.

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.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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 new titles from poets Miriam Bird Greenberg and Donika Kelly. Miriam will be reading from In the Volcano’s Mouth, which won the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; Donika will read from her debut collection, Bestiary, which was selected by Nikky Finney for the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Miriam Bird Greenberg‘s In the Volcano’s Mouth (University of Pittsburgh 2016) won the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was written with the support of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Poetry Foundation. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she teaches creative writing and ESL in the San Francisco Bay Area, though she has also crossed the continent aboard freight trains, as a hitchhiker, and by bicycle. She is currently at work on an expansive/unwieldy ethnographic poetry project documenting asylum seekers and economic migrants living in Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions.

Donika Kelly’s debut collection, Bestiary (Graywolf Press 2016), was selected by Nikky Finney for the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. She holds an MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2013, she received a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University, where she specialized in American literature and film studies. Donika is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a 2004 June Fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. Her poems have appeared in various journals including West Branch, Indiana Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. Donika is an Assistant Professor at St. Bonaventure University, where she teaches creative writing.

You’re invited to join us for the inaugural Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! Bob Ayres, Nan Cuba, BettySoo, and W. W. McNeal (left to right, below) will share their artistic works based on the theme of “Flight.”

Founded in 2010 by Peg Alford Pursell, Why There Are Words is an award-winning literary reading series that takes place every second Thursday in the San Francisco Bay Area, and beginning in 2017, will take place at 5 more national locations: New York City, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Portland, and Austin. Each reading event presents a range of writers, including those who have published books and those who haven’t. All writers share the criterion of excellence. The guiding idea behind the series is that good work is timeless and needs to be heard regardless of marketing or commercial concerns. If you’re interested in reading, please see the information about participating on this page.

A native of San Antonio, Bob Ayres has lived in Austin since 1985. An alum of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, he has published poems in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies. His chapbook, Shadow of Wings, was published in 2012 by Main Street Rag Press. His essay “The Devices and Desires of Our Own Hearts: Reflections on Blessing and Curse in the Psalms of Ascent” appeared in Poets on the Psalms, published by Trinity University Press. He was the winner of the 2013 Littoral Press Broadside Contest. Bob served on the founding board of Gemini Ink in San Antonio, and he has served as a volunteer with Poetry at Round Top since its inception fifteen years ago. When he’s not writing or reading poems, Bob might be managing his family’s ranch on Barton Creek in southwest Travis count, or supporting the work of private land conservation as a member of the national board of the Land Trust Alliance. Or, he might be watching birds.

Nan Cuba is the author of Body and Bread (Engine Books, 2013), winner of the PEN Southwest Award in Fiction and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction; it was also listed as one of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” in O, Oprah’s Magazine, was a “Summer Books” choice from Huffington Post, and the San Antonio Express-News called it one of the “Best Books of 2013.”  Cuba co-edited Art at our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008), and published other work in such places as Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Columbia, and Chicago Tribune’s Printer’s Row. Her story, “Watching Alice Watch,” was one of the Million Writers Award Notable Stories (storySouth), and “When Horses Fly” won the George Nixon Creative Writing Award for Best Prose from the Conference of College Teachers of English. As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in LIFE, Third Coast, and D Magazine. She has received a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, an artist residency at Fundación Valparaiso in Spain, and was a finalist for theHumanities Texas Award for Individual Achievement. She is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center, and teaches in the MA/MFA Program in Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Justice at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, where she is writer-in-residence. 

In the past ten years, BettySoo zigzagged her way across the North American and European continents dozens of times. The Austin American-Statesman says BettySoo has “exceptionally well-arranged songs, as easily equal in precision to, say, Patty Griffin or Alison Krauss…a confidence that speaks volumes,” and KUT praises her “beautiful, heart-wrenching songs that are also edgy and unwavering.” Her albums include: Let Me Love You, Never the Pretty Girl, Heat Sin Water Skin, Tiny Little Secrets, and When We’re Gone. Previous albums have garnered successively greater and numerous positive reviews. BettySoo’s last album, Heat Sin Water Skin, received a great deal of radio airplay, including spins at influential Non-Comm/Triple A stations WFUV, KUT, WXPN, KGSR, KDRP and SiriusXM’s The Loft. 

W. W. McNeal is a retired trial lawyer and a sixth-generation Texan. He lives on a Caldwell County ranch in Central Texas that has been in his family since 1850. The 436 acre spread backing up to the San Marcos River was purchased from the first grantees and the original 1850 deed to the property is locked securely in a desk that belonged to his great grandfather. He grew up on the ranch he lives on now, an only child fascinated by Texas lore and the natural environment that surrounded him. Plum Creek is not only a piece of Texas historical fiction but an homage to the area in which Bill came of age. A student at the University of Texas at the same time that J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb were teaching there, McNeal’s inherent love of Texas and respect for early settlers and Texas Rangers gained focus. Throughout the years, he continued to study and envision what Texas life was like in the years after the civil war. Plum Creek is the product of those many hours of research and imagination.

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!

Malvern’s Multi-Verse features 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 guest is local poet Nick Courtright.

Nick Courtright is the author of Let There Be Light, called “a continual surprise and a revelation” by Naomi Shihab Nye, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist. He is Co-Executive Editor and book designer for Gold Wake Press, and the founder and Executive 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. At the University of Texas he is currently studying the epistemological implications of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”

Join us in celebrating the launch of local poetry press INF Press. Poets Jenna Martin Opperman and Andrea Eames will be reading from their newly released poetry collections, the initial offerings of INF Press.

Jenna Martin Opperman has a BA in English Literature from The University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Despite being published in a wide variety of poetry journals and magazines, she prefers the thrill and terror of performing before a live audience. She works and plays with the printed word every day as an English teacher, as the owner of Red Planet Audiobooks, and as the co-founder of INF Press. Her poetry comes from a place of ferocity, of playfulness, of emotional urgency, and of hope. She loves whisky, revelation, and naps.

Praise for Shattering is Gradual by Jenna Martin Opperman:

This highly-polished, cerebral collection spans years of writing, and is an achievement both elegant and emotional. Love, heartbreak and self-realization are major themes, described with wry, often funny, always balanced poignancy.

Andrea Eames is a poet and novelist living in Austin after eight years in New Zealand and seventeen in Zimbabwe. She has released two critically acclaimed novels so far, both published by Harvill Secker (an imprint of Penguin Random House UK) and set in Zimbabwe: The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011) and The White Shadow (2012). The White Shadow was shortlisted for the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize. Her first poetry collection, The Making of Stones, was released in March 2016 and her second, New Monsters, was released in February 2017. Andrea aims to be vulnerable, vivid, and honest in her poetry and prose.

Praise for New Monsters by Andrea Eames:

New Monsters is not for the timid. A study in the feminine as much as the poet, Eames’ new collection is fearless, revealing women in our full, unfettered beauty. Within these pages, we are ravenous and angry, raw and polished, simultaneously ourselves and our search for something larger—much like the collection itself.

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 April selection is Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. In Lolly Willowes, Warner’s first novel, she tells of an aging spinster’s struggle to break way from her controlling family—a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s brilliantly varied and self-possessed literary production never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved. . . . This is the witty, eerie, tender but firm life history of a middle-class Englishwoman who politely declines to make the expected connection with the opposite sex and becomes a witch instead. —John Updike

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 April 1st.

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 a fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

This month, as well as our Open Mic, we have a special guest, Austin artist and author David Borden. We’ll be celebrating the release of And Yet We Rise, David’s graphic novel on life as a caregiver to a significantly disabled child. Meditative, humorous, and raw, And Yet We Rise dares to dive into the hidden world of parenting a medically fragile child with significant, multiple disabilities. This graphic novel explores the beauty and heartbreak with frankness and humanity.

David Borden is an artist and award winning writer living in Austin, Texas with his wife and daughter. He’s held various jobs in education: director of art programming at a non-profit for persons with disabilities, ESL and GED instructor, and college administrator. Once, long ago, he even sold everything and moved to Morocco for five years. He is often described as unconventional, irreverent, and indomitable. His daughter Savannah taught him to laugh loudly, face every day with courage, and dare to dream.

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

Join us in celebrating the launch of Michael Anania’s poetry collection, Continuous Showings.

With Anania’s familiar, quick movement from perception to the precise but often kinetic image and his extraordinary musicality, Continuous Showings explores a wide range of continuities, from the persistence of tribal culture and language in Mexico to the experience of a fifties movie with Sinatra and Doris Day, from Newton’s alchemical encounter with the New World to the coincidence of science and Dadaism in Paris in 1922, from lute music to jazz.  The collection’s final section, the award-winning “Omaha Appendices,” returns to the setting of Anania’s early poetry and fiction to examine the tragicomedy of Italian-American life in the Midwest.

Michael Anania is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. His published work includes twelve collections of poetry, among them Selected Poems (l994), In Natural Light (1999) and Heat Lines (2006). His work is widely anthologized and has been translated into Italian, German, French, Spanish and Czech. He has also published a novel, The Red Menace, and a collection of essays, In Plain Sight. He has received a number of awards and fellowships, including the Charles Angoff Award and the Aniello Lauri Award for poems in this collection.
Anania was poetry editor of Audit, a quarterly, founder and co-editor of Audit/Poetry, poetry and literary editor of The Swallow Press, poetry editor of Partisan Review and a contributing editor to Tri-Quarterly and has served as an advisory editor to a number of other magazines and presses. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the faculty in writing at Northwestern University. He also taught at SUNY at Buffalo and the University of Chicago. He lives in Austin, Texas, and on Lake Michigan.

Join us for a night with Austin’s Typewriter Rodeo! Rodeo members David Fruchter and Sean Petrie will write full-length poems for us on-the-spot, on vintage typewriters, based on whatever prompts the Malvern audience provides. And our Curmudgeon in Chief Joe Bratcher will also interview the Rodeo crew about their ad-lib artistry. Come along for a fun night of extemporaneous poetry… and be prepared with a suggestion or two!

You can read more about Typewriter Rodeo here.

We’re thrilled to be hosting a series of readings as part of the 25th annual Austin International Poetry Festival.

12:00 – 1:30: Workshop facilitated by Joaquin Zihuatanejo (State Feature)
1:45 – 3:15: Workshop facilitated by Robert Lee Brewer (National Feature)
3:30 – 4:45: Poetry of the Times Read hosted by Griselda Castillo

See the Austin International Poetry Festival website for the full schedule of readings.

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 books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month we have something rather special: a SciFi/Fantasy/Speculative fiction-themed reading with two very talented writers, Ron Seybold and S.R. Bond. Ron will be reading from his debut novel, Viral Times. S.R. will share an excerpt from The Lost Witch, book one of The Lost Universe trilogy.

Ron Seybold directs the Writer’s Workshop in Austin, a place for workshopping books and weekly creativity groups for writers which has published its anthology Small Packages. A two-time finalist in Writer’s League of Texas manuscript contests, he’s reported over the radio, acted in Austin melodramas, and walks his standard poodle Tess Harding a little less often than she’d like. A teaching volunteer at the Austin Bat Cave literacy program in schools, he coaches writers, edits books, and plays a part in helping authors from inspiration to publication. 

S.R. Bond is a sci-fi/fantasy writer and dog trainer located in the hill country near Austin. She has always been an avid bookworm, the kid who read books at recess instead of playing on the jungle gym. Creating stories has been a part of her life since she could form coherent sentences. She spends her free time feeding her TV addiction and hanging out with her dog, an Australian shepherd mix named Percy (more formally known as Perseus the Destroyer).

We’re thrilled to be hosting a series of readings as part of the 25th annual Austin International Poetry Festival.

12:00 – 2:15: Voice of Empathy Read hosted by Hal C. Clark
2:30 – 4:45: City Read at Malvern Books hosted by Sandi Horton

See the Austin International Poetry Festival website for the full schedule of readings.

Join us in celebrating the launch of new books from poets Andrew Wessels, James Meetze, and Kelli Anne Noftle, with readings from Andrew, James, and Kelli, plus special guest John Fry. Andrew will be reading from A Turkish Dictionary; James will read from Phantom Hour; and Kelli will read from Adam Cannot Be Adam.

Andrew Wessels currently splits his time between Los Angeles and Istanbul, where he teaches at Koç University. He has previously lived in Houston, Cambridge, and Las Vegas. He has held fellowships from Poets & Writers and the Black Mountain Institute. His first book is A Turkish Dictionary from 1913 Press. Semi Circle, a chapbook of his translations of the Turkish poet Nurduran Duman, was published by Goodmorning Menagerie in 2016. His poems and translations can be found in VOLT, Witness, Tammy Journal, Faultline, and Colorado Review, among others. He is the NOS Series editor at Les Figues Press and a founding editor of The Offending Adam.

James Meetze [Metz] is the author of three books, including Phantom Hour and Dayglo, which was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2010 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, both published by Ahsahta Press. He is editor, with Simon Pettet, of Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010). James lives in San Diego, where he is a professor of creative writing and film studies at Ashford University. 

Kelli Anne Noftle is a poet, musician, and business manager who currently lives in San Diego with her husband and their 50-year-old Sulcata tortoise, Bong Rip. Her first collection of poems, I Was There For Your Somniloquy, was selected by Rae Armantrout for the 2010 Omnidawn Book Prize. Her new book of poems, Adam Cannot Be Adam, is now out from Omnidawn Publishing.

John Fry is the author of the chapbook silt will swirl (NewBorder, 2012). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, West Branch, Water~Stone Review, and The Laurel Review, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Texas State University. He serves as a poetry editor for Newfound Journal, and he is an assistant instructor and PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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 “Pretense Is Underrated.” Our featured artists include: DONNA DECHEN BIRDWELL, JUSTIN BOOTH, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, & THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for a meeting of the Boomertime Book Club! This month they will be reading I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai.

The Boomertime Book Club aims to read all types of books, fiction and nonfiction. We select the book to be read at a meeting and then discuss it at the next meeting. We meet monthly. We limit attendance at each meeting to  no more than twelve in order to encourage participation by all. Attendance is first come, first served. We encourage guests and encourage new membership within the Meetup Boomertime social group. For more information, please email Greg Smith at greg02390239@gmail.com.

Boomertime is a Meetup group for babyboomers (ages 50+). Its purpose is to provide opportunities for Austin adults to have fun and meet new people. Boomertime is a group where individuals can make friends and can plan events around their special interests for all to participate in. Boomers dance, hike, read, talk, laugh, and engage in many more activities.

In celebration of Caits Meissner’s new poetry collection, Let It Die Hungry, join us for a reading with Caits, plus special guests Ebony Stewart and Amanda Johnston.

In this world where so many things are uncertain, shaky, volatile, Let It Die Hungry does not offer easy solutions, but builds upon the idea that to affect change, one must look inward and learn from the infinities of the self before pointing our human tentacles outward. It is an inspiration for what a book can do and I argue there needs to be more literature like this, now more than ever. Literature that calls the world out, holds it in the light, and demands the reader do the work too. Oh, and did I mention the artwork? It’s pretty dope too. —M.K. Rainey, 3:AM Magazine

New York City-based Caits Meissner (center, above) is the author of the multidisciplinary poetry book Let It Die Hungry, and The Letter All Your Friends Have Written You, co-written with poet Tishon Woolcock. Her award-winning work has been widely published in journals and anthologies. Caits serves as Writer-in-Residence at Bronx Academy of Letters, facilitates classes at the transgender unit of Manhattan Detention Center and is part-time faculty at The New School University and CUNY. Her current projects include writing with ReEmergent Theatre, a company in collaboration with people emerging from prison, and you can find her touring her new book in public venues, as well as prisons across America. She is completing her MFA at City College of New York.

Ebony Stewart (left, above) is an international touring artist, poet, writer, occasional slammer. Been on some teams. Coached a lot of teams. Won a bunch of awards. Been featured in a bunch of articles, journals, and magazines. Ate a lot of cupcakes. She. Her. Woman. So black she be magic. Ebony Stewart aka The Gully Princess, story of the black girl winning.

Amanda Johnston (right, above) earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them Kinfolks Quarterly, Muzzle, Pluck! and the anthologies Small Batch, di-ver-city and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. The recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Johnston is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, a co-founder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding executive director of Torch Literary Arts.

Join us for something rather special: Austin Community College’s Creative Writing Department will be introducing us to the two winners of their 2015 Balcones Prize: writer Margaret Malone, whose debut short story collection People Like You won the Fiction Prize; and Michael Wiegers, editor of What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, which won the Poetry Prize.

In Margaret Malone’s debut story collection, characters in the thick of everyday experience absent of epiphanies, are caught off-guard or cast adrift by personal impulses even while wide awake to their own imperfections. Final judge John Blair called the book ‘a masterfully minimalist collection of lives lived poorly but with the best of intentions. Her stories are powerful, sad, and plain-spoken, and this debut collection takes the normative-yet-desperate circuits of the day-to-day that Bobbie Anne Mason and Frederick Barthelme brought to the forefront of American short fiction and makes them both new again and powerfully affecting. These are marvelous and worthy stories, and very much deserving of recognition.’

Malone’s writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, Oregon Humanities Magazine, Coal City Review, Propeller Quarterly, The Timberline Review, Swink, Nailed and latimes.com. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and Literary Arts, two Regional Arts & Culture Council Project Grants, and residencies at The Sitka Center and Soapstone. Malone has a degree in Philosophy from Humboldt State University and has taught creative writing as a visiting artist at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She lives with her husband filmmaker Brian Padian and two children in Portland, where she co-hosts the artist and literary gathering SHARE. (Photo by Sabina Poole.)

Michael Wiegers is poetry editor of Narrative Magazine and executive editor of Copper Canyon Press. His previous titles include This Art, The Poet’s Child and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (co-edited with Monica de la Torre).

Join us in celebrating the launch of Schadenfreude, A Love Story by Rebecca Schuman. We’ll enjoy readings from Rebecca and Susan Signe Morrison.

Schadenfreude is the story of a teenage Jewish intellectual who falls in love—in love with a boy (who breaks her heart), a language (that’s nearly impossible to master), a culture (that’s nihilistic, but punctual), and a landscape (that’s breathtaking when there’s not a wall in the way). At once a snapshot of a young woman finding herself, and a country slowly starting to stitch itself back together after nearly a century of war (both hot and cold), Schadenfreude, A Love Story is an exhilarating, hilarious, and yes, maybe even heartfelt memoir proving that sometimes the truest loves play hard to get.

Rebecca Schuman is a St. Louis-based writer and translator who contributes regularly to The Awl, The Hairpin, Slate, the Atlantic, and other publications. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from The New School and a PhD in German from the University of California-Irvine. SCHADENFREUDE, A LOVE STORY is her first work of commercial nonfiction.

Living in Austin, Texas and Professor of English at Texas State University, Susan Signe Morrison lived in Germany during the 1980s and taught in the former East Germany. Her Stasi file has some unusual (and false) assertions. She will read selections from her published works on historical and legendary Germanic women.

You’re already familiar with our NYRB Classics Bookclub, in which we read and discuss classic works of fiction… now we’d like to invite you to join The Other Book Club, a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from the “Other” section of our store.

Our recently expanded “Other” collection includes ever so eclectic essays, plays, creative non-fiction, memoirs and more. Featuring books like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travels through the Greek islands and the political tracts of Simone Weil—and let’s not forget Oskar Panizza’s blasphemous essay on the history of the pig!—our non-fiction section is as unusual as the rest of our store.

April’s book will be Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a collection of short lyric essays that explore personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love.

Bluets reaches far beyond the constraints of its subject, resulting in a series of delicately associative numbered paragraphs investigating a broken romantic relationship, a friend’s chronic nerve pain, the writing process itself, and the deceptive elements of perception and color. The result not only defies easy categorization, but also leans toward Walter Benjamin’s famous declaration that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. —Rob Schlegel, Jacket

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 Saturday, April 15th, at 12pm!

“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 Tomás Q. Morín’s new poetry collection, Patient Zero (Copper Canyon Press). With readings from Tomás and Elena Passarello.

Tomás Q. Morín’s Patient Zero is full of life and its undeniable hungers. Claws, fins, mouths, and feathers populate a fanciful world: a man in a crowded market becomes a tree of butterflies, a mountain gives a feline yawn, grocery bags contain “milk for bones — salt for blood.” Meanwhile at the edge of the fantastic, realism beckons: the buzzard stalks the tortoise, heartbreak sickens the living, and each beginning contains an end.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and with Mari L’Esperance co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Elena Passarello is the author of two collections of essays, Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses. Her essays on performance, pop, culture, and the natural world have recently appeared in Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2015 Whiting Award in nonfiction, she teaches at Oregon State University.

Join us as Massachusetts-based author Yarrow Paisley makes his Texas debut with a reading from his first full-length collection of narrations, I, No Other. Paisley’s absurdist narratives are somewhat in the spirit of, and absolutely as contrast to, the work of Rimbaud. Their pain is as vital as their delight. Joining Yarrow will be Austin-based writer Felix Morgan. 

Yarrow Paisley is an exciting new author in the field of literary speculative fiction, because his stories have fascinating originality, disturbing atmosphere and captivating strangeness. —RisingShadow

Yarrow Paisley’s first full-length collection, I, No Other is a cerebral defibrillator you forgot had been implanted until it routinely—and unexpectedly—shocks you back to life. They may hurt at times, the jolts of these agitations, but it is a vital hurt. With a cast of narrators on the brink of discovery in all its forms, I, No Other collects Yarrow Paisley’s most exquisite absurdist interludes.

Felix Morgan is an online dating consultant, professor, and journalist writing for publications including The Austin Chronicle, Birth. Movies. Death, The American Genius, and Nuclear Salad. She has an almost doctoral degree from Texas Tech University where she specialized in research on people’s relationships with fictional characters. Her fiction and poetry has been published by Lucky Dark, Awst Press, and Tallow Eider Quarterly. She lives in Austin with her two warrior-princess-ninja-superhero daughters and some other wild animals.

In tandem with a workshop they’re leading at the Fusebox Festival on Sunday, April 16th, Ayden LeRoux and Abraham Burickson offer a reading from their book Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One (Princeton Architectural Press). Odyssey Works infiltrates the life of one person at a time to create a custom-tailored, life-altering performance. It may last for one day or a few months and consists of experiences that blur the boundaries of life and art. The book uses a performance for Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm, to discuss the broader ideas of their creative and collaborative work. Ayden and Abraham will read from portions of the book and discuss the ideas within, along with holding a question and answer session with the audience.

Ayden LeRoux is an artist, writer, critic, and educator. She is the author of Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2016, and Isolation and Amazement, published by Samsara Press in 2012. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Public Books, Cosmonauts Avenue, Theo Westenberger Estate, Works & Conversations, and Emergent Art Space. She is a regular contributor to Glasstire. LeRoux’s photography, performance, installation, and video work often incorporates text and has been exhibited in China, Cuba, Greece, and throughout the United States. She has had solo exhibitions at IDIO Gallery and Flux Factory in New York. She was an artist in residence at the ACE Hotel, Flux Factory, and with the Alaskan Parks and Recreation Department. LeRoux collaborates frequently and is the Assistant Director of Odyssey Works, an interdisciplinary performance group that studies the life of one individual and makes immersive, durational experiences for that person. Odyssey Works has been featured by Newsweek, the New York Times, ArtInfo, BOMB, Hyperallergic, the Marina Abramovic Institute, Vulture, NPR’s Studio 360, Fast Company, and San Francisco Magazine. She has been a Visiting Artist, lectured, and led workshops at the Brooklyn Museum, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Fordham University, and Battersea Centre for the Arts, among others. 

Abraham Burickson is the Co-founder and Artistic Director of Odyssey Works. Burickson was trained in architecture; his work spans writing, design, and performance.

This event is co-sponsored by the Michener Center for Writers.

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 for an evening with poets Cathy Eisenhower, Shubh Schiesser, and Gloria Amescua.

Cathy Eisenhower is a recent transplant to Austin, TX, and is the author of Language of the Dog-heads (Phylum 2001), clearing without reversal (Edge 2008), would with and (Roof 2009), and distance decay (Ugly Duckling 2015). She co-curated the In Your Ear Reading Series for several years in Washington, DC, and her work has appeared in The Recluse, Aufgabe, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence.

Shubh Bala Schiesser’s poems have appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar, Di-Verse-City Anthology, The Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Ardent Poetry in the Arts, Austin Poetry Society, Forest Fest Anthology, Lamesa, The Enigmatist, Blue Hole, Galaxy of Verse, the Austin Chronicle, San Antonio High Way, Big River Poetry Review, Illay’s Honey, Drash Pit, and Muse India, among others. Her chapbook, Sacred River: Poems from India, was published by Sociosights Press, Austin in 2016.

Gloria Amescua, CantoMundo fellow and Hedgebrook alumna, has been published in various journals and anthologies, including Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art, and The Crafty Poet II. She has won the Austin Poetry Society and Christina Sergeyevna Awards. Gloria also received the 2016 New Voices Award Honor for her picture book manuscript in verse, Luz Jiménez, No Ordinary Girl.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Deborah Clearman’s short story collection, Concepción and the Baby Brokers (Rain Mountain Press), which features nine thematically linked stories set largely in Guatemala. Deborah will be joined by writer Scott Semegran.

This collection brings to life characters struggling with universal emotions and dilemmas in a place unfamiliar to most Americans. From the close-knit community of Todos Santos to the teeming danger of Guatemala City, to a meat-packing plant in Michigan and the gardens of Washington DC, Deborah Clearman shows us the human cost of international adoption, drug trafficking, and immigration. With searing humanity, Clearman exposes the consequences of American exceptionalism, and the daily magic and peril that inform and shape ordinary lives.

Deborah Clearman is the author of a novel Todos Santos, from Black Lawrence Press. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals. She is the former Program Director for NY Writers Coalition, and she teaches creative writing in such nontraditional venues as senior centers, public housing projects, and the jail for women on Rikers Island. She lives in New York City and Guatemala.

Scott Semegran lives in Austin, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in English. He is a cartoonist and a writer. He can also bend metal with his mind and run really fast, if chased by a pack of wolves. His comic strips have appeared in the following newspapers: The Austin Student, The Funny Times, The Austin American-Statesman, Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, Seven Days, The University of Texas at Dallas Mercury, and The North Austin Bee. His short stories have appeared in independent publications and literary journals like The Next One Literary Journal from the Texas Tech University Honors College. He is a Kindle bestselling author.

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!

Malvern’s Multi-Verse features 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 guests are David Jewell (pictured at left) and Ric Lance Scow Williams (right). We’ll be celebrating the launch of the second volume of their Last Word/First Word endeavor, a collaborative effort involving years of emailing poems back and forth, nearly every day, using the last word of the sender’s poem to start the poem to be sent back.

David Jewell is a poet, storyteller, author, actor and stream of consciousness visionary imagineer who chronicles the 21st century mind and its many idiosyncrasies. He and his writing have appeared in two Richard Linklater movies, Before Sunrise and Waking Life, and he’s shared shows with Laurie Anderson and Leon Redbone. His books are time bombs already detonating in another generation and hIs bio says he was “born in blank and lives in and.”

Richard “Ric” Lance Scow Williams was an associate editor for The Austin Chronicle from 1988-2012. In 2007, his the secret book of god was chosen by Robert Bonazzi of the San Antonio Express-News as “The Best Book of Poetry by a Poet Living in Texas.” He lives in Glorieta, New Mexico, with his wife, astrologer Helga Scow Williams, and two cats, Bat and Mouse. His latest books are Helga (2015) and Jealousy Cured: Cancer & Other Invisible Matters (2016), both from Bite Press. His collaborations with David Jewell are Last Word/First Word: Volume 1 (2015,) and their latest 52 Pickup: Last Word/First Word: Volume 2 (2017), both also from Bite Press.

Join us for an evening with myth-maker and storyteller William Kuko, who will share a personal narrative mixed with history and myth to create a sacred place.

William Kuko (ウィリアム・空狐) is an inhabitant of the Pacific Northwest. Most of his time is spent in the Seattle metro area; he is an hermit and recluse by nature, even in the metropolis. Often Mr. Kuko disappears into the Cascade Mountains for great lengths of time. He is a most extraordinary student of poetry, history and all things biologic. Most importantly, William Kuko is a myth-maker and a storyteller: he makes all that was old and forgotten new again.

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. April’s I Screamers are Jenny Keto, Tiffany Mendoza, and Liz Moskowitz.

This month is extra special because in honor of National Poetry Month, Malvern Books is offering 20% OFF ALL POETRY, including large volume collections, chapbooks, poetry anthologies, and already deeply discounted $5 poetry books.

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.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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

Join us for an evening with poets Brad Richard, W. Joe Hoppe, and Abe Louise Young (left to right, below).

Brad Richard chairs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans. 2015 Louisiana Artist of the Year, and poetry winner in the 2002 Poets & Writers Writers Exchange competition, Brad is the author of three collections of poems, Habitations, Motion Studies (winner of the 2010 Washington Prize) and Butcher’s Sugar, and two chapbooks, The Men in the Dark and Curtain Optional. His poems and reviews have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Okey-Panky, Unlikely Stories, Guernica, American Letters & Commentary, and other journals. Mr. Richard is co-director of the southeast Louisiana affiliate of the Scholastic Writing Awards and of The New Orleans New Writers Literary Festival. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Surdna Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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.

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.