Malvern Books

“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.

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 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.

November’s book will be Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel memoir Mani: Travels In The Southern Peloponnese.
The Mani, at the tip of Greece’s southernmost promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people’s daily lives. Patrick Leigh Fermor bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century.

Almost every page has its own literary tour de force, often with intimidating displays of learning and research mixed with fantasy, imagination and acute descriptions of the scene itself.
— Robin Hanbury-Tenison

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, November 18th!

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.

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 Simon Leys’ The Death of Napoleon, an alternative history that looks at “what could have been” had Napoleon escaped from exile on Saint Helena and returned to France to try to claim back his throne.

Utterly satisfying sentence by sentence and scene by scene, but it is also compulsively readable . . . Simon Leys throws light on our universal need to bring inner and outer reality together, to understand who we really are.— The Times Literary Supplement

A small masterpiece. So much spirit, so much insolence, and so much emotion joined in so few pages overwhelmingly earn the reader’s enthusiasm and praise. One closes the book regretfully, sincerely hoping that Simon Leys will not stop there. —Corinne Desportes, Le Magazine Litterairet

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 2nd.

“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.

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.

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 Tayeb Salih’s The Wedding of Zein.

Everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that Zein will be getting married, since Zein’s particular role in the life of the village has been the peculiar one of falling in love again and again with girls who promptly marry another man. It would be unheard of for him to get married himself.

In Tayeb Salih’s wonderfully agile telling, the story of how this miracle came to be is one that engages the tensions that exist in the village, or indeed in any community: tensions between the devout and the profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional. In the end, however, Zein’s ridiculous good luck augurs an ultimate reconciliation, opening a prospect of a world made whole.

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 6th.

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.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is poet, playwright, and activist Nikki Luellen.

Nikki Luellen is a poet, playwright, and activist from Houston, Texas. In the past year, she has been writing and performing poems inspired by her active involvement with families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality and by her work with the group Refuse Fascism.

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

“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.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a brand-new reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

For our inaugural meeting, we’ll be discussing Joy of Missing Out by Ana Božičević.

Joy of Missing Out is starlite verse on death and independence for the dreamers, dropouts, rebels and the neuroatypical. A confession and sublimation of breakdowns personal and systemic, JOMO paints a playful and unflinching portrait of the ups and downs of city survival and queer romance. Simultaneously it deploys online slang and high lyrical registers, morphs the sad girl into Baba Yaga, drops truth bombs on art and politics, and puts the sin into sincerity. Even as it engineers the death of its speaker, JOMO is a paradoxically joyous litany of her endurance and a boost-plea to stay in a messed-up world and say it out loud. This anthem is best read at night or dawn when no one’s around for a Like or a kiss.

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on Saturday, January 27th, at 1pm for the inaugural meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club.

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 Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, the hilarious tale of a young American woman hell-bent on living who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s.

One of the funniest books I’ve ever read; it should be subtitled Daisy Miller’s Revenge.
— Gore Vidal

American goes to some big city with dreams of conquest, hilarity ensues. Dundy’s 1958 novel (which had a huge fan in Groucho Marx) is pretty much the best and funniest example of that whole genre.
—Flavorwire

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 3rd.

“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.

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 acclaimed poet Carl Phillips. We’ll be celebrating the recent release of his new collection, Wild Is the Wind. This event is sponsored by the Michener Center for Writers.

In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named—love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past’s capacity both to teach and to mislead us—also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love’s fallout. How “to say no to despair”? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee? These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips’s remarkable work, stand as further proof that “if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we would have needed to invent him. His idiosyncratic style, his innovative method, and his unique voice are essential steps in the evolution of the craft.” —Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review

Carl Phillips is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018). His collection The Rest of Love (FSG, 2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other books include Rock Harbor (FSG, 2002); The Tether (FSG, 2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Pastoral (Graywolf Press, 2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Carl Phillips is a visiting poet at the Michener Center for a one week residency this semester.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde.

The Black Unicorn is a collection of poems by a woman who, Adrienne Rich writes, “for the complexity of her vision, for her moral courage and the catalytic passion of her language, has already become, for many, an indispensable poet.”

Rich continues: “Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader’s eye.”

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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.

This month’s selection is Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl, a masterful analysis of what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world.

Christine toils in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine’s rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same…

In The Post-Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart … The story is poignant, painful, and must be one of fiction’s darkest indictments of how poverty destroys hope, enjoyment, beauty, brightness and laughter, and how money, no matter how falsely, provides ease and delight.
—The Spectator

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is scientist and author Juli Berwald.

Marine invertebrates stole Juli Berwald’s heart on her first snorkel in the Red Sea during college. Hoping to study the ocean forever, she spent seven years building mathematical algorithms to interpret satellite imagery of the ocean, receiving her Ph.D. in ocean science. Her husband stole her heart next, and she drifted away from the ocean to Austin, Texas to be with him. Landlocked, she wrote textbooks and popular science articles for National Geographic, the New York Times, Nature, and Redbook before the story of jellyfish led her back to the sea. Her science memoir, Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, is “a heartfelt plea for humans to fulfill their responsibilities toward nature” (The New Yorker).

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

“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.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Silk Poems by Jen Bervin.

Silk Poems takes silk as subject and form, exploring its cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities. In conjunction with Tufts University’s Silk Lab’s cutting-edge research on liquified silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem composed in a six-character chain that corresponds to the DNA structure of silk; modeled on the way a silkworm applies filament to its cocoon. This poem, written from the perspective of the silkworm, explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written inside the body.

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us for an evening devoted to discussion of Claudia Rankine’s award-winning poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric, a powerful and direct engagement with race and violence in present-day American culture. We’ll also be discussing the cultural significance of the film Black Panther, and pose questions to the audience about the world as seen through the book and the movie. With host Joe Brundidge and guests Daria Howard and Kelene Blake-Fallon.

Joe Brundidge is an author and public speaker, and has hosted a number of open mic events for almost 20 years, including Spoken & Heard at Kick Butt Coffee, an event he curates. 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.” His second book of poetry, Element 615, was released in 2017.

Daria Howard is a Spoken Word Artist, Youth Development Professional at Boys & Girls Clubs of the Austin Area, and a Teaching Artist with the Speak Piece Poetry Project.

Kelene Blake-Fallon is a Spoken Word Artist, Health and Wellness Consultant, and Adjunct Professor in the Adult Degree Program at Huston-Tillotson University.

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric,  published by Graywolf Press in 2014, is the first work of poetry to become a New York Times bestseller for multiple weeks on the paperback nonfiction list. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and was also a finalist for the award in criticism, the first time in the history of those awards that a book was named a finalist in more than one category. “A classic that will be read, referred to and reflected on for generations” (Lit Hub), Citizen is a genre-bending work of art combining lyric prose with internal monologues, visual art, slogans, photographs, quotes, a screen grab from YouTube, and film scripts. It is a touchstone for talking candidly about racism. And it is a time capsule of contemporary headlines and key figures, with references to, among other things, Hurricane Katrina, the tennis champion Serena Williams, the 2006 World Cup, and the fatal shooting of Florida resident Trayvon Martin. Through a series of vignettes, the book recounts everyday moments of racism “of a kind that accumulate until they become a poisonous scourge: being skipped in line at the pharmacy by a white man, because he has failed to notice you in front of him; being told approvingly, as a schoolchild, that your features are like those of a white person; being furiously accosted by a trauma therapist who does not believe that the patient she is expecting could look like you” (The New Yorker). “I started working on Citizen as a way of talking about invisible racism—moments that you experience and that happen really fast,” Rankine told The New Yorker.

Jamaican-born author Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, two plays, and numerous video collaborations. She is the editor of several poetry anthologies, serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2016. Also in 2016, following ten years of teaching at Pomona College in Claremont, California, she was named the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

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.

This month’s selection is The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999). Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of The Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy’s novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.

A masterfully paced and intellectually daring plot. Like the best science fiction, of which this is an exemplar, Bioy’s themes have become ever more relevant to a society beholden to image. It is this keenness of thought and expression that buttresses Borges’s claim of the novella’s perfection. —The Times

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

“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.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Spring and All by William Carlos Williams.

Voted by the New York Times as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination—a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that crystalizes in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language recreates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams’s best known poetry, including Section I, which opens, “By the road to the contagious hospital” (now commonly known by the title “Spring and All”), and Section XXII, where Williams penned his most famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” 

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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.

This month’s selection is Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood, an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians.

Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz … reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila … Reading Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, ‘4/60 air conditioning’—that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair. —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is writer Natalia Sylvester.

Natalia Sylvester is the author of the novels Chasing the Sun and Everyone Knows You Go Home, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by Real Simple. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Miami and is a faculty member of the low-res MFA program at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. Natalia’s articles have appeared in Latina Magazine, Writer’s Digest, The Austin American-Statesman, and NBCLatino.com. Born in Lima, Peru, she came to the U.S. at age four and spent time in South and Central Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas before her family set roots in Miami. She now lives and works in Austin.

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

“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.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Good Bones by Maggie Smith.

Smith’s poem “Good Bones” was called “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International. In the collection of the same name, Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world.

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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.

This month’s selection is Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó, a striking story of the relationship between a mother and a daughter who come from two different worlds and have different ideas of what it means to lead a good life.

Magda Szabo’s work casts an indirect light upon the dimness that exists between our public and private selves, a place wherein our betrayals—both personal and political—flicker uneasily over the walls . . . Iza’s Ballad should solidify Szabo’s standing as a master novelist amongst her English-language readers.
—Dustin Illingworth, LitHub

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

“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.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is On Lost Sheep by Japanese Modernist poet Shiro Murano (1901-1975), translated by Goro Takano.

In order to survive at all as a poet Murano had to cross the treacherous boundary of pre and postwar cultural ideologies —the latter just as guilty in its omissions as the earlier era was in its excess. Hence Murano’s realism is of necessity a tragic one. He believed that the poet writes from the night of the world in the face of the forgetting of Being. The task of the poet was to break free of this night. Murano summed up his poetics as a yearning for authentic Being. Goro Takano’s translations pass through this difficult terrain with painstaking care, reflecting the precision of the original while at the same time not shying away from allowing the strain of such a task to show through—a strain which we both know is more than merely a linguistic one. —Eric Selland

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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.

This month’s selection is Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama. First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay.

Available in English for the first time, this 1956 classic of Argentine literature presents a riveting portrait of a mind deteriorating as the 18th century draws to a close … The final images of the novel are haunting and unforgettable. This extraordinary novel, whose English translation has been so long in coming, is a once and future classic.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is novelist, poet, and essayist Anis Shivani.

Anis Shivani is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of several books of fiction, poetry, and criticism each, including, most recently, Karachi Raj: A Novel, Soraya: Sonnets, Literary Writing in the 21^st Century: Conversations, and the forthcoming A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less. His work appears in many leading literary journals. 

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

“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.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Shatter the Bell in My Ear: Selected Poems of Christine Lavant, translated by David Chorlton.

Born in Austria in 1915, Christine Thonhauser (Lavant) was the ninth child of a miner, Georg, and his wife, Anna, and grew up in poverty. While the poetry she was later to write contained the language of spirituality, the pain she described in it came from actual conditions which she suffered: scrofula and tuberculosis of the lungs. Being disadvantaged in health also meant she could not complete her education as intended. Unable to do hard physical work, she earned a living with knitting and weaving until she gained a reputation as a writer. Writing sometimes in rhyme, sometimes in free verse, Lavant employed directness in her language.

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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.

This month’s selection is The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette, a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction.

Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew—a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with a serious ulcer. Michel hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson pursues. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate.

The Mad and the Bad is so dark it redefines noir: bleak and pointed, yes, but also infused with an understanding that what passes between us is not only compromised but more often faithless, less a matter of commitment or connection than a kind of unrelenting animal need. —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

“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.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Some Animal by Ely Shipley.

Aligned with queer theories of temporality, fragments of memoir rub against the language of psychiatric and medical regimes at the site of a body that does not conform to a gender binary. Some Animal draws out dream-like and supernatural resonances between the literature of pathology and experiences of gender dysphoria.

 

“This remarkable, brilliant and brave poetry by Ely Shipley is an emblem for our time when US-lawmakers are making LGBTQ bodies outlaw in many states, their Christian extremism telling an entire generation they are subhuman. Float out of body with these poems then come hurtling down to land on our feet together and demand safety, equity, and a place at the table for all people. I love this book!” —CA Conrad

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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.

This month’s selection is Talk by Linda Rosenkrantz, a hilariously irreverent testament to dialogue. Talk is the result of conversations between three ambitious and artistic 30-somethings, recorded by Linda Rosenkrantz and transformed into a novel whose form and content put it well ahead of its time. Controversial upon its first publication in 1968, Talk remains fresh, lascivious, and laugh-out-loud funny nearly fifty years later.

Are New Yorkers the best talkers in the world? We’ve become familiar now with this style of talk—smart, witty, ironic, tangential, obsessing over trivia—through sitcoms like Friends; but Rosenkratz was among the first to realise that it’s an art-form in its own right. —Brandon Robshaw, The Independent

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

“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.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is Rinku Sen, author of The Accidental American and Stir It Up: Lessons on Community Organizing.

Rinku Sen is a writer and a political strategist. With over 30 years experience leading racial justice organizations in the United States, she has trained thousands of organizers, activists and agents of social change across the country. Rinku is currently Senior Strategist at Race Forward, having formerly served as Executive Director and as Publisher of their award-winning news site Colorlines. Under Sen’s leadership, Race Forward has generated some of the most impactful racial justice successes. One example is the groundbreaking 2011 Shattered Families report, which changed the immigration debate with investigative research on how record deportations of parents were leading to the placement of thousands of children in foster care, often separating them permanently and legally from their families. Sen was the architect of Drop the I-Word, a campaign for media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal,” resulting in the Associated Press, USA Today, LA Times, and many more outlets dropping the i-word, affecting millions of readers every day. Her books Stir it Up and The Accidental American theorize a model of community organizing that integrates a political analysis of race, gender, class, poverty, sexuality, and other systems. A key advisor in the philanthropy world, Rinku has worked with foundations like Novo, Open Society, Nathan Cummings and Kellogg. She is a devoted board member of numerous social justice organizations including Hedgebrook, a residency that supports visionary women writers to help achieve a just and peaceful world; the Ms. Foundation for Women, a public foundation building women’s collective power for social, economic and reproductive justice; and the Advancement Project, a multiracial civil rights organization dedicated to eliminating structural racism through high impact policy change. She also serves on the board of Maven, the largest independent media coalition in North America. A highly sought-after keynote speaker for colleges, Sen has spoken at Harvard, Brown, University of Michigan, Penn State, and was the Commencement Speaker at Antioch New England. She is a James O. Gibson Innovation Fellow at PolicyLink.

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Indictus by Natalie Eilbert.

Natalie Eilbert’s Indictus summons what cannot be said while finding a way to articulate, with ferocity and exuberance and a clear and brutal vision, the violence of misogynistic systems and cultures and the ways in which they devour and destroy their inhabitants. It’s not just that this book doesn’t waste words. It goes further than that. Each sound, line, breath is charged with an energy that is explosive. Indictus lays all its cards on the table so there are no doubts about just how high the stakes here are: “I didn’t mean to assemble my whole career on lies, so now I blast holes in the men.” Yet in this world of broken bodies, Eilbert’s tenacity, her sheer drive to get to the end of a thought, to get the words onto the page, conveys a demand: to be honest, to resist, to live. —Daniel Borzutzky

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us for a meet and greet with author Lacey Schmidt, hosted by the Sapphic Reading Group. Everyone is welcome!

By day, Dr. Lacey Schmidt is a “corporate” suit. She runs her own company, Minerva Work Solutions, and serves as the Executive Director for Faculty Development at the University of Houston. When she sheds her daytime persona, Lacey morphs into other roles: poet, artist, adventurer, and novelist. In the latter instance, she has published three LesFic romances with Affinity Rainbow Publications: A Walk Away, Catch to Release, and Playing With Matches. In addition, a drama/thriller, A Badge Washed Up, will be available Summer 2019. Lacey has also penned several short stories. Two romances, Love’s Luck and Peaches and Honey, are in anthologies published by Affinity. Lacey’s latest short story is a sci-fi adventure entitled A Lone Star. It’s part of The Lone Star Collection, an anthology which benefits LesFic literary events. Lacey is married and lives in Houston. She and Laura have several furry children: Oberon, the tabby terrorist, and his sidekick, Sabina, plus two couch-loving canines, Misha and Nakita. Playtime for Lacey involves doing barrel rolls in a T-38, swimming with barracudas in the Caribbean, and flying NASA’s shuttle simulator.

The Sapphic Reading Group of Austin, Texas, celebrates and promotes works of fiction by women that authentically express the historical, cultural, political, and interpersonal experiences of lesbians. The group serves as a forum for lovers of lesbian fiction to discuss good reads, exchange books, and share news concerning the LesFic literary community. We welcome readers, authors, editors, and publishers of lesbian fiction.

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.

This month’s selection is Kenneth Fearing’s Clark Gifford’s Body, a paranoid tour de force of political noir.

Clark Gifford’s Body skips back and forth in time, interspersing newspaper clippings and court transcripts with the reactions of the politicians, generals, businessmen, waiters, journalists, and soldiers who double as the actors and the chorus in a drama over which, finally, they have no control. Who here is leading? Who is being led? Fearing’s novel is a pseudo-documentary of a world given over to pseudo-politics and pseudo-events, a prophetic glimpse of the future as a poisonous fog.

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

“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.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Pei Pei the Monkey King by Wawa.

Pei Pei the Monkey King, Wawa’s first book, is a playful book about painful subjects in contemporary Hong Kong, namely the Umbrella Revolution of 2014, the Fishball Revolution of 2016 and an on-going epidemic of suicides among young people. The author, who has recently moved to Honolulu, knows internal and external exile. The translator, Henry Wei Leung, has written a clear and perceptive introduction to the language and politics of Hong Kong. He also addresses the difficulties in translating Chinese poetry into English, noting that even people who speak ‘Chinese’ can often not understand each other. The book ends with an interview between poet and translator that elucidates the book’s private concerns.

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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.

This month’s selection is The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns, an enthralling and macabre fairy tale.

Through her reimagining of the wicked stepmother figure, Comyns speculates convincingly as to how damage escalates despite all conscious attempts to limit itself. —Helen Oyeyemi

Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful … there’s also something uniquely original about her voice. Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius. —The Observer

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is writer and educator Jack Kaulfus.

Jack Kaulfus is the author of the short story collection Tomorrow or Forever (Transgress Press, 2018). Their work has been published in A Cappella Zoo, Heavy Feather Review, and Off the Rocks, among other journals. Jack teaches high school English in Austin, Texas, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University in San Marcos. When all the grading is finished, Jack plays in the queer Americana band Brand New Key.

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

Join us for a meet and greet with authors Jaycie Morrison and Barbara Ann Wright, hosted by the Sapphic Reading Group. Everyone is welcome!

Jaycie Morrison is a second generation native Dallasite who is also in love with Colorado and now splits her time between the two. She lives with her wife of over two decades and their spoiled dog. As a youngster, Jaycie and her friends entertained themselves making up and acting out stories featuring characters from popular TV shows or favorite bands. As a voracious reader, she always wondered what it would be like to write a book. Once she started, it was almost impossible to stop. Jaycie’s debut novel, Basic Training of the Heart, (Bold Strokes Books, fall, 2016) and its sequel, Heart’s Orders (2017), are the first two in a series that combine her love of the written word and her fascination with history. “Weather or Not,” in The Lone Star Collection, is her first short story.

Barbara Ann Wright pens fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories when not adding to her enormous book collection or ranting on her blog. She says that her writing career can be boiled down to two points: when her mother bought her a typewriter in the sixth grade, and when she took second place in the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing in 2004. One gave her the means to write and the other gave her the confidence to keep going. Believing in oneself, in her opinion, is the most important thing a person can do. Barbara’s short fiction has appeared twice in Crossed Genres Magazine and once made Tangent Online’s recommended reading list. She’s published ten novels with Bold Strokes Books. Her first novel, The Pyramid Waltz, was one of Tor.com’s “Reviewer’s Choice” books. It was also a “Foreword Review Book of the Year” award finalist, as well as a GCLS Goldie finalist. In addition, The Pyramid Waltz won the 2013 Rainbow Award for Best Lesbian Fantasy and made Book Riot’s “100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors.” Barbara has been the recipient of four other Rainbow Awards, and her novel, Coils, was a finalist in the 2017 Lambda Awards. Her latest novel is The Tattered Lands. Barbara lives in the Austin area with a small army of pets, and she’s not afraid to sic them on her critics.

The Sapphic Reading Group of Austin, Texas, celebrates and promotes works of fiction by women that authentically express the historical, cultural, political, and interpersonal experiences of lesbians. The group serves as a forum for lovers of lesbian fiction to discuss good reads, exchange books, and share news concerning the LesFic literary community. We welcome readers, authors, editors, and publishers of lesbian fiction.

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.

This month’s selection is Ending Up by Kingsley Amis.

Ending Up is a grimly hilarious dance of death, full of bickering, bitching, backstabbing, drinking (of course), and idiocy of all sorts. It is a book about dying people and about a dying England, clinging to its memories of greatness as it succumbs to terminal decay.

“Ending Up is a sardonic little masterpiece which, with incredible economy and stylistic restraint, shows what old age is really like, and also—far, far better than any other writer I know—what contemporary England is like.”

—Anthony Burgess

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

“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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is The Happy End / All Welcome by Mónica de la Torre.

The Happy End / All Welcome is set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees. De la Torre builds, fastens, cuts, pastes, performs, and extrudes a variety of poems to suit this most serious situation comedy: poems as job interviews, poems as postings, poems as questionnaires, reports, speeches, lyrical rants… At its heart, this playful bricolage explores the norms of the workplace and its notions of competence, while tackling office design, performativity, and skilled vs. deskilled creative labor.

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us for a reading from The Lumberjack’s Dove—and a shadow puppet crankie show—with visiting writer GennaRose Nethercott, and with special guest Sean Petrie.

In the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a lumberjack who cuts his hand off with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand shapeshifts into a dove. Far from representing just an event of pain and loss in the body, this incident spirals outward to explore countless facets of being human, prompting profound reflections on sacrifice and longing, time and memory, and—finally—considering the act of storytelling itself. The lumberjack, his hand, and the axe that separated the two all become participants in the story, with unique perspectives to share and lessons to impart. “I taught your fathers how to love,” Axe says to the acorns and leaves around her. “I mean to be felled, sliced to lumber, & reassembled into a new body.” Inflected with the uncanny enchantment of modern folklore and animated by the sly shifting of points-of-view, The Lumberjack’s Dove is wise, richly textured poetry from a boundlessly creative new voice.

GennaRose Nethercott’s book The Lumberjack’s Dove was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series for 2017. She is also the lyricist behind the narrative song collection Modern Ballads, and is a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellow. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including BOMB, The Massachusetts Review, The Offing, and PANK, and she has been a writer-in-residence at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, Art Farm Nebraska, and The Vermont Studio Center, among others. A born Vermonter, she tours nationally and internationally composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter.

Sean Petrie is a founding member of “Typewriter Rodeo,” whose poetry book came out earlier this year. He has 6 short books coming out in 2019 as part of Fountas & Pinnell’s “Leveled Books” series. He also teaches legal writing at UT, and thinks Buffy is the best show ever.

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.

This month’s selection is Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig.

Helen Weinzweig published her first novel when she was fifty-eight. Basic Black with Pearls, her second, won the Toronto Book Award and has since come to be recognized as a feminist landmark. Here Weinzweig imbues the formal inventiveness of the nouveau roman with psychological poignancy and surprising humor to tell a story of simultaneous dissolution and discovery.

 

“Celebrated in Canada as a feminist classic, Weinzweig’s searing 1980 novel captures a woman’s awakening to her lover’s exploitation….Weinzweig’s prose style is sharp, particularly her dialogue: strange and surprising, it knocks every character interaction askew.”
—Publishers Weekly

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers and artists talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s Borderless features a conversation between writer and curator Lise Ragbir (left, below) and esteemed visual artist Deborah Roberts (right, below) about the connection between text, literature, visual art, and social justice.

Lise Ragbir is a writer, curator and Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2017, she was Jack Jones Literary Art’s Tiphanie Yanique Fellow. In 2015, she was an invited participant in Callaloo’s Creative Writing Workshop, in Barbados. Her essays about arts and culture, race, and immigration have appeared in The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Time Magazine, and USA Today, among other outlets. She was born and raised in Montreal, and now makes her home in Austin, Texas.

Deborah Roberts (American, b. 1962) is a mixed media artist whose work challenges the notion of ideal beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the USA and Europe. Roberts’ work is in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles, California; Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey; and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, New York. Roberts is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016) and Ginsburg-Klaus Award Fellowship (2014). She received her MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She lives and works in Austin, Texas. Roberts is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon.

The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s powerful new book,  Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust  deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” Autobiography of Death, Kim’s most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates death—how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “you” speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. 

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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.

This month’s selection is Anna Seghers’s Transit, an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.

On its own, this story is an important untold story of the refugee situation in Second World War-era Europe, but in its own grappling with its allegorical nature, Segher transforms the book into a masterpiece. Seghers balances these two impulses in telling her story with an existential, theological layer. The situation of these refugees mimics the course of the human soul. —Vol 1.Brooklyn

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful—the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

You’re invited to join us for another Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! The theme of this month’s reading is “Walk on the Wild Side,” and the readers are Tomás Q. Morín, Carrie Fountain, Sarah Bird, and Eliza Gilkyson (left to right, below).

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 or would like more information, please contact Alison: wtawaustin@gmail.com.

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 is at work on a memoir about fathers. He teaches at Drew University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and The New Yorker, among others. Her debut collection, Burn Lake, was a National Poetry Series winner and was published in 2010 by Penguin. Her second collection, Instant Winner, was published by Penguin in 2014. Fountain’s debut novel, I’m Not Missing, was published in July, 2018 by Flatiron Books (Macmillan). Born and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico, Fountain received her MFA as a fellow at the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Currently writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University and Visiting Professor at the Michener Center, she is the host of NPR’s This Is Just to Say, a radio show and podcast where she has intimate conversations with America’s most influential poets. Fountain lives in Austin with her husband, playwright and novelist Kirk Lynn, and their two children.

Sarah Bird is the author of nine novels and one book of non-fiction. Her latest novel, Above the East China Sea, was long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award; was an ALEX Award nominee; winner of the 2016 Texas Philosophical Society Literary Award; a Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice; a Seattle Times Best Book of the Year; a Tucson Book Festival Great Books for Book Club selection; and a Marie Claire Best Summer Reads. Sarah has been an NPR Moth Radio Hour storyteller, and a writer for Oprah’s Magazine and the NY Times Sunday Magazine. During her ten-year screenwriting career, Sarah was hired to write for Paramount, CBS, Warner Bros, National Geographic, ABC, TNT, as well as several independent producers. Her latest novel, Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen, inspired by the true story of Cathy/Cathay Williams, the only woman to serve with the fabled Buffalo Soldiers and the first woman to enlist in the peacetime U.S. Army, has been selected to be a lead Fall 2018 title.

Eliza Gilkyson is a twice Grammy-nominated (2006/2015) singer songwriter and activist who is one of the most respected musicians in Folk, Roots and Americana circles. Her songs have been covered by Joan Baez, Bob Geldof, Tom Rush and Rosanne Cash and have appeared in films, PBS specials and on prime-time TV. A member of the Austin Music Hall of Fame, and a recent inductee into the Austin Songwriter Hall of Fame, she has won countless Folk Alliance and Austin Music awards, including 2014’s Songwriter of the Year. Eliza’s music has always offered a vivid reflection of the times we live in, full of joys and sorrows, each song a window into a life of struggle and triumph in a world she feels is “poised on the edge of moral, economic and environmental bankruptcy.” Her new CD released in summer 2018 from Red House Records, is titled Secularia.

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.

This month’s selection is The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler.

Alexander Pushkin’s short novel is set during the reign of Catherine the Great, when the Cossacks rose up in rebellion against the Russian empress. Presented as the memoir of Pyotr Grinyov, a nobleman, The Captain’s Daughter tells how, as a feckless youth and fledgling officer, Grinyov was sent from St. Petersburg to serve in faraway southern Russia. At once a fairy tale and a thrilling historical novel, this singularly Russian work of the imagination is also a timeless, universal, and very winning story of how love and duty can summon pluck and luck to confront calamity.

The Captain’s Daughter is one of the stories in which Pushkin created Russian prose…. It is true poet’s prose, absolutely clear, objective, unpretentious and penetrating.
—The Spectator

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers and artists talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world. This month’s guest is Monica Muñoz Martinez.

Monica Muñoz Martinez is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and an Andrew Carnegie fellow. She an award-winning author, educator, and public historian. Her research specializes in histories of violence, policing on the US-Mexico border, Latinx history, women and gender studies, and public humanities. Her first book The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard University Press, Sept 2018) is a moving account of a little-known period of state-sponsored racial terror inflicted on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas–Mexico borderlands. She is currently at work on Mapping Violence, a digital research project that recovers histories of racial violence in Texas between 1900 and 1930. Martinez is also a founding member of the non-profit organization Refusing to Forget that calls for public commemorations of anti-Mexican violence in Texas. Born and raised in Uvalde, Texas, Martinez received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.

You’re invited to join us for another Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s theme is “Alchemy” and the readers are Joe Nick Patoski, Hugh Fitzsimons III, Bronte Treat, Elizabeth Harris, Dena Afrasiabi, and Gurf Morlix.

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 or would like more information, please contact Alison: wtawaustin@gmail.com.

A staff writer for Texas Monthly magazine for eighteen years, and a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, Joe Nick Patoski (top row, left) has authored and co-authored biographies of Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Selena, and the Dallas Cowboys, directed a film on the Texas musician Doug Sahm, and collaborated on books about the Texas Mountains, the Texas Coast, and Big Bend National Park. His tenth book is Austin to ATX: The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers & Geeks Who Transformed the Capital of Texas.

Hugh Fitzsimons III (top row, middle) is a third-generation rancher from Dimmit County, Texas, and a director of the Wintergarden Groundwater Conservation District. He is currently expanding into the cultivation of environmentally beneficial restorative plants and crops. His first book, the memoir A Rock Between Two Rivers, was published in 2018 by Trinity University Press.

Bronte Treat (top row, right) is a writer based in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in Sorin Oak Review, Peach Fuzz Magazine, and Women of Venus. She studied Rhetoric and Writing at St. Edward’s University, where she was an editor of Arete Academic Journal. Her work is concerned with family history and identity.

Elizabeth Harris’s novel, Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman, winner of the Gival Press Novel Award and an Austin Chronicle Top Read of 2015, was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction. Her first collection of stories, The Ant Generator, was winner of the University of Iowa Press John Simmons Prize. Harris (bottom row, left) taught fiction writing and modern literature for a number of years at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. She and her husband divide their time between the Texas coast and Austin.

Dena Afrasiabi (bottom row, middle) is an editor and fiction writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Toast, and Fiction Southeast, among other publications. Her writing has received fellowship support from the Millay Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s currently at work on a novel.

Gurf Morlix (bottom row, right) won mainstream recognition during his time as Lucinda Williams’ guitar player, musical director and producer. After they had a falling out over the band’s musical direction, Morlix moved on and became a freelance producer. Since then, he’s helmed projects by a diverse set of country and Americana artists including Robert Earl Keen, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Slaid Cleaves and Mary Gauthier, as well as his own records. His new recording is Impossible Blue 2019.

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.

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.

This month’s selection is Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. 

Perhaps every novelist harbors a monster at heart, an irrepressible and utterly irresponsible fantasist, not to mention a born and ingenious liar, without which all her art would go for naught. Angel, at any rate, is the story of such a monster. Angelica Deverell lives above her diligent, drab mother’s grocery shop in a dreary turn-of-the-century English neighborhood, but spends her days dreaming of handsome Paradise House, where her aunt is enthroned as a maid. But in Angel’s imagination, she is the mistress of the house, a realm of lavish opulence, of evening gowns and peacocks. Then she begins to write popular novels, and this fantasy becomes her life. And now that she has tasted success, Angel has no intention of letting anyone stand in her way—except, perhaps, herself.

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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

Join us for an evening with Austin Community College Performance Poet and Community Engagement Specialist Taria Person.

Taria Person “The Realest Person,” author of Rainbow Elephant, and playwright of the stageplay Hangers, performs poetry about conflict resolution through self-awareness, and acknowledging, respecting, and accepting each other’s differences.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.

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.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Of Death. Minimal Odes by Hilda Hilst, translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin.

If life is no more than a prolonged flirtation with death, then Hilda Hilst’s Of Death. Minimal Odes is the true account of a lifelong seduction. It is at once both a reverie and reliquary, as the poet imagines and reimagines that most paradoxical moment of disintegration—the corporeal flesh fusing with death’s own dark corpus. With a visceral-mystical poetic voice that is as teasingly unrestrained as it is intellectually sublime, Hilst’s odes enact a baroque danse macabre, where the poet revels in the incongruities of simultaneously seeking the sacred and profane. Translating the first collection of Hilda Hilst’s significant body of poetry to appear in English, Laura Cescarco Eglin renders the imagery and philosophical complexity of these minimal odes with brio, while preserving the playful tone and lush melodies that mark Of Death. Minimal Odes as uniquely Hilstian.

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 a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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.

This month’s selection is The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt.

A weird wonder of Argentine and modern literature and a crucial work for Julio Cortázar, The Seven Madmen begins when its hapless and hopeless hero, Erdosain, is dismissed from his job as a bill collector for embezzlement. Then his wife leaves him and things only go downhill after that. Brutal, uncouth, and brilliantly colored, The Seven Madmen takes its bearings from Dostoyevsky while looking forward to Thomas Pynchon and Marvel Comics.

“So firmly rooted was Arlt in the explosive urban society and political culture of his time that his book is able to illuminate what was actually to happen during the first Peronist era in the 1940s and in the country’s later descent into violence in the 1970s after Juan Peron had returned as President for the last time. It is one of the great books of the 20th century.” —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 to discuss a NYRB classic!

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers and artists talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world. This month’s Borderless will feature a conversation between ire’ne lara silva and Marilyse Figueroa.

ire’ne lara silva is the author of two poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) and Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), which were both finalists for the International Latino Book Award in Poetry, an e-chapbook, Enduring Azucares (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), as well as a short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013), which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute Books, 2017), a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldúa Milagro Award. ire’ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci. Her latest collection of poetry, CUICACALLI/House of Song, was published by Saddle Road in April 2019.

Marilyse V. Figueroa is an unapologetic Scorpio just like Björk. They are a proud queer Xicanx-Boricua from Oklahoma and Tejas. They have been published in Acentos Review, St. Sucia Zine, and many others. You can catch this water sign writing poems, short fiction, or anything else that flows with their *feelings*. Marilyse works with youth and their writing whenever possible. They are currently the Regional Program Manager for Austin Bat Cave and Director of the San Marcos, Texas chapter of Barrio Writers Workshop.

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.

Join Austin Audio Fiction at Malvern Books for a special introduction to local fiction podcasts. From sci-fi adventure to urban fantasy, learn about the world of audio drama and how your next favorite writer may actually be in your ears. Featuring Chris Garrett (“Splintered Caravan” podcast);Michelle Nickolaisen (“Unplaced”); Gabe Alvarez (“Starcalled”); and A. R. Olivieri (“GREAT & TERRIBLE”).

Michelle Nickolaisen is a writer and creator based in Austin, TX, with projects ranging from a novel series to a tabletop RPG to, of course, fictional podcasts. When not working on one of these projects, you can often find Michelle at the bouldering gym or training martial arts.

A. R. Olivieri is in fact a writer, director, producer, voice actor, anxiety sufferer, imposter, and french fry addict. Mostly though, he’s a creator of podcasts. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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.