Malvern Books

Join us in celebrating the upcoming launch of visiting poet Sarah Herrin’s chapbook, The Oceanography of Her (Papeachu Press). Sarah will be joined by Christia Madacsi Hoffman.

Sarah Herrin is a poet based in Seattle, Washington. Raised in the Deep South, she escaped to the Pacific Northwest in 2012. She achieved a BFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she studied Sequential Art and Creative Writing. Her work is inspired by world travel, her bisexual identity, mental health, heartbreak and healing, the ocean, and above all—love. She is a gemologist, runner/triathlete, cat mom, wife, and Bowie lover. Sarah is the author of One Thousand Questions (And No Good Answers) and the chapbook The Oceanography of Her, to be released October 2019.

Christia Madacsi Hoffman grew up along the banks of the Mystic River in Mystic, Connecticut. Through her Austin-based company, CenterLight Media, Hoffman works as a marketing and editorial writer, graphic designer, and actor. Her early career adventures included antique furniture restoration and leading treks in the high Himalaya. With an accessible and insightful poetic voice, Hoffman’s poetry explores the universal themes of place, beauty, youth, and family. Her personal reflections reveal the depth in our everyday experiences and the significance of our intentions.

Join us for a reading from final year students in The Michener Center for Writers and the New Writers Project M.F.A. programs in creative writing at UT Austin. Readers include Shaina Frazier, Loan Tran, Darby Jardeleza, Max Seifert, and Desiree Evans (left to right, below).

Shaina Frazier was born in Sacramento, CA but was raised in H-Town. She earned her BFA from the University of Houston in 2015 and is currently a fiction MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at UT Austin. She is currently writing about race and talking nooses and magic and martyrdom.

Loan Tran lives in Austin, TX and likes to browse around bookstores and the produce section of supermarkets. She is in the New Writers Project and writes poems.

Darby Jardeleza is currently in her second year at the New Writers Project. She is from Bluffton, South Carolina, though she most recently moved to Austin from Atlanta, Georgia. She is at work on her first novel thanks to the help and support of the NWP and Michener community.

Max Seifert writes poetry. You can find it in The Adroit Journal, b[OINK] Zine, Gulf Coast, and Tupelo Quarterly. He lives over by Eastwoods Neighborhood Park.

Desiree Evans is a writer, activist, and scholar hailing from south Louisiana. She is currently an MFA Fiction Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin. Her writing has received fellowships and support from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

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 a classic of golden age noir, In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes.

Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele.  To his mind nothing has come close to matching “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.” He prowls the foggy city night—bus stops and stretches of darkened beaches and movie houses just emptying out—seeking solitary young women. His funds are running out and his frustrations are growing. Where is the good life he was promised? Why does he always get a raw deal? Then he hooks up with his old Air Corps buddy Brub, now working for the LAPD, who just happens to be on the trail of the strangler who’s been terrorizing the women of the city for months…

“A tour de force laying open the mind and motives of a killer with extraordinary empathy. The structure is flawless, and the scenes of postwar LA have an immediacy that puts Chandler to shame. No wonder Hughes is the master we keep turning to.” —Sara Paretsky

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 association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

This month we also have two featured guests: Spirit Thom and The Old Hats.

Spirit Thom is a co-Founder of the Austin International Poetry Festival. He is an improvising bard who works with WORDJAZZ LOWSTARS, and used to tour with MOTHER GONG, KANGAROO MOON, etc. He had his own bands FUTURE NOW in England, and WE ARE ALIVE! in Australia—and Thom believes his best poem will be his next poem. He appreciates and respects THE LION & THE PIRATE, THE OLD HATS, and Malvern Books.

The Old Hats perform Original American Music and Authentic Frontier Jibberish.

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

Join us in celebrating the collection America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience. With co-editor Murray Silverstein, as well as Miriam Bird Greenberg, Jesús I. Valles, and Abe Louise Young.

Soon after the 2016 presidential election, Sixteen Rivers Press, a shared-work collective of Northern California poets, conducted a nationally advertised call for submissions, seeking unpublished poems that would “respond to the cultural, moral, and political rifts that now divide our country: poems of resistance and resilience, witness and vision, that embody what it means to be a citizen in a time when our democracy is threatened.” In a matter of weeks, the press received over two thousand poems. The work came from across the country, from red states and blue states, high schools and nursing homes, big cities and small towns. At the same time, the poet-members of the press were asked to nominate poems. These poems could be old or new, published or not, the poets living or dead—anything from anywhere that spoke to this moment in the voice of poetry. In this way, the editors gathered another three hundred poems, ranging from Virgil and Dante to Claudia Rankine and Mai Der Vang, from Milton to Merwin, from Bai Juyi to last Thursday’s just-posted Poem-a-Day. America, We Call Your Name is a blend of poems from these two sources, each of its nine sections a kind of town-hall meeting where citizen-poets gather to raise their voices, now raucous, now muted, now lyric, now plain: voices responding with dissent and consoling with praise, perspective, vision, and hope.

Murray Silverstein is Sr. Editor of America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (2010), both from Sixteen Rivers Press. He is the author of two books of poetry, Master of Leaves (2014) and Any Old Wolf (2007). Any Old Wolf received the 2007 Independent Publisher medal for poetry. He is a retired architect and co-author of four books about architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press). His poems have appeared in RATTLE, Brooklyn Review, Spillway, California Quarterly, Poetry East, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, Zyzzyva, Fourteen Hills, Pembroke Magazine, Elysian Fields, and other journals. Silverstein lives in Oakland, California.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month’s featured reader is Britta Jensen, who will be reading from Eloia Born, a Young Adult science fiction novel.

Britta Jensen’s debut novel Eloia Born was long-listed for the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. The sequel, Hirana’s War, releases in early summer 2020. Her stories have been shortlisted for the 2017 Henshaw Press and Fiction Factory prizes and she was published in the following anthologies: Stories for Homes, volume 2 and Sakura Dreams. Britta’s plays have been performed in New York City, Japan and South Korea. She holds a BA in Acting Performance from Fordham University and an MA in Teaching of English Literature from Columbia University and has taught in schools and therapeutic settings for fifteen years. Britta spent twenty-two years overseas in Japan, South Korea, and Germany before moving to Austin, Texas.

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

This month’s Novel Night authors are David Odle and Dustin McKissen. David will read from his Urban Fantasy novel, Markus. Dustin will read from The Poor and The Haunted, his first horror novel.

Markus Blue is one of the most powerful men alive. Fire from his hands can destroy armies and his battles are legendary. He is one of a rare breed called the warlock, one of the last of his kind and he is dying. But he must face one more battle, one more challenge or it will mean the end of the world as we know it.

David Odle discovered his love for writing at the age of thirteen while growing up in Warren County, Indiana. After seven years in the military and over thirteen years as an IT consultant living in Austin, Texas, he now resides right back in Indiana with his wife and five children where he is currently finalizing his next novel.

As a child Jimmy Lansford and his sister Kelly suffered crushing poverty, their father’s unexplained and frightening suicide, and their mother’s constant abuse and cruelty. Having grown to be a successful adult, Jimmy must contend with the sudden re-emergence of memories from his childhood in Oklahoma and unexplainable events occurring inside his own home. Is it more than memories that haunt Jimmy? Did his parents suffer from mental illness and addiction, or were they possessed by something even worse—and has that presence arrived to take Jimmy?

Dustin McKissen is an award-winning writer for a variety of publications. In addition to his non-fiction writing, Dustin is the author of the novel The Civil War at Home and the award-winning short stories Wife Number Six and My Name is Theodore Robert Bundy, and I am a Nixon Man. He lives in St. Charles, Missouri with his wife Megan and their three children. Dustin is a graduate of Prescott College and Northern Arizona University.

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 guest is Oscar Cásares.

Oscar Cásares is the author of Brownsville, a collection of stories that was an American Library Association Notable Book of 2004, and is now included in the curriculum at several American universities, and the novel Amigoland. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Copernicus Society of America, and the Texas Institute of Letters. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin, where he lives. (Author photo credit: Joel Salcido.)

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 “Silver Linings” and the guests are Kathryn Schwille, Kristen Staby Rembold, Mark Solomon, Marian Szczepanski, and musical duo Joanna Howerton and Michael Cross.

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.

Kathryn Schwille (top left) is the author of the novel What Luck, This Life, set in East Texas around the time of the Columbia shuttle disaster. It was selected by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as one of the best southern books of 2018. Her short stories have appeared in New Letters, Memorious, Crazyhorse, Literary Hub, and other journals, and have been cited twice for Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize. She lives in North Carolina and teaches at Charlotte Center for Literary Arts.

Kristen Staby Rembold’s (top center) most recent book is Music Lesson, poetry, published in 2019 by Future Cycle Press. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Leaf and Tendril and Coming into This World, and a novel, Felicity, winner of Mid-List First Fiction Series Award. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals including Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Literary Mama, Smartish Pace, and New Ohio Review. She has taught poetry and fiction writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is former co-editor of IRIS: A Journal About Women. She holds degrees from Northwestern University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Mark Solomon (top right) has lived in NYC since 1941. Since 1973 his poems have appeared in Broadway Boogie, TriQuarterly, Hanging Loose, BOMB, The Marlboro Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Southern Poetry Review. A chapbook, Her Whom I Summoned, and My True Body, his first full-length collection, are available through Havel.Havulim@gmail.com

Marian Szczepanski (bottom left) is the author of the historical novel Playing St. Barbara (High Hill Press, 2013), which Huffington Post called “a stunning debut novel that shimmers with unforgettable characters while casting necessary light on a dark chapter in American history.” She has won awards for short fiction and magazine writing and holds an MFA in fiction from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a faculty member at Houston’s Writespace creative writing center and has also taught for the Texas Writers League (Austin), Gemini Ink (San Antonio), Village Writing School (Eureka Springs and Rogers, AR), University of Pittsburgh’s Writers Café, and St. Francis University (Loretto, PA). She divides her time between Houston and Hood River, Oregon.

Joanna Howerton grew up in a musical family in the beautiful hills of Kentucky. In the Blues, she found her true voice and style and honed her vocal skills and played with various R&B and jazz ensembles in New Orleans and Austin. Her partnership and duo with Michael Cross has been transformative, inspiring the creation of a sound that bridges their past and current influences.

Michael Cross, a talented vocalist, lyricist, composer and seasoned recording artist, has toured nationally and internationally. Recording projects include TX Blues Voices, and his own album Blues Lovin’ Man. Michael’s latest collaboration with Joanna Howerton has inspired new material and their duo is steadily building an enthusiastic following.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join us in celebrating the launch of Esteban Rodríguez’s debut poetry collection, Dusk & Dust, which explores the lives of the generations who have made their homes along the US-Mexico border, in a landscape too often neglected and forgotten. Rodríguez will be joined by Leanna Petronella, Saul Hernandez, and Gabino Iglesias.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press) and the micro-chapbook  Soledad (Ghost City Press, 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His reviews have appeared in PANK and American Book Review. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

Leanna Petronella’s debut collection, The Imaginary Age, won the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, Quarterly West, and other publications. She holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. She lives in Austin.

Saúl Hernández is a queer writer from San Antonio, TX. He was raised by undocumented parents and as a Jehovah Witness. He has a MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. He’s the former Director for Barrio Writers at Borderlands. He’s a semi-finalists for the 2018 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers, Nimrod Literary Journal. His work has appeared/is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Normal School, and Rio Grande Review.

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book critic living in Austin. He is the author of Coyote Songs and Zero Saints. His words have appeared in venues like the New York Times, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Times, and others. He is the book reviews editor for PANK Magazine and a columnist for LitReactor and CLASH Media.

Join us in celebrating the release of L.B. Deyo’s The God-Damned Fool. the second publication of Austin-based publishing company Persistence of Vision.

Join us for a reading with Texas State University faculty members. Featured readers include Steve Wilson, Kathleen Peirce, Roger Jones, John Blair, and Cecily Parks.

Steve Wilson’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide, as well as in four collections, the most recent titled Lose to Find. His new collection, The Reaches, is due out in November.

Kathleen Peirce is the author of Vault, The Ardors, The Oval Hour, Divided Touch/Divided Color, and Mercy. Among her awards are The Iowa Prize, a Whiting Award, The William Carlos Williams Award, and The AWP Prize. A fellow with The Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts, she’s been teaching at Texas State University since 1993.

John Blair has published six books, most recently Playful Song Called Beautiful (University of Iowa Press, 2016), and is the recipient of multiple literary awards, including The Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Iowa Poetry Prize. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Texas State University.

Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow and O’Nights, and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. She teaches at Texas State University.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women and nonbinary writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Heather Lefebvre, Amanda Scott, and Rachel Gray.

Heather Lefebvre is a writer/editor from New Hampshire and essentially an icy birch tree at heart. She is the founder of Broad! Magazine and Scorpion Baby Press, a fiction reader with fields, and a member of the Lenguas Locx writers collective. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published with Hobart, Sycamore Review, SunMoon Missive, the first I Scream Social anthology, and elsewhere. In her free time, you can find her at karaoke or in the kitchen baking bread. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is dark chocolate, olive oil and sea salt (from Lick). Follow Heather online: IG: @moonwithmonocle / Twitter: @lefavor / website: heatherlefebvre.com

Amanda Scott is a Senior Lecturer at Texas State University, where she also serves as Assistant Executive Editor for Porter House Review. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, New South, phoebe, The Common, and elsewhere. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is dark chocolate raspberry. Follow Amanda on Twitter and IG here: @alizscott

Rachel Gray is a writer and educator living in Austin. She has been published in Two Serious Ladies and Hobart, and has won numerous awards for her work. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is pistachio.

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

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

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

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 Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen.

Ghost Of elegizes a brother lost via suicide, is a mourning song for the idea of family, a family haunted by ghosts of war, trauma, and history. Nguyen’s debut is not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: remnants of memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space. Through lyric meditation, Nguyen seeks to bridge the realms of the living with the dead, the past with the present. These poems are checkpoints at the border of a mind, with arms outstretched in bold tenderness.

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 John Poch and Jacob Shores-Argüello.

John Poch is the author six collections of poetry, two which were published this year: Texases  (WordFarm Press) and Between Two Rivers (TTU Press—with photographer Jerod Foster). His work has been published in Poetry, Paris Review, the Nation, Yale Review, and other journals. He teaches at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Jacob Shores-Argüello is a Costa Rican American poet and prose writer. His second book Paraíso was selected for the inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize judged by Aracelis Girmay. He is a 2018/019 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Lannan Literary Fellow for Poetry. His work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The Academy of American Poets, among others.

Join author Amber Elby to celebrate the release of her third novel, Trouble Fires Burn, a fantasy adventure based on the plays of William Shakespeare. Amber and special guest author Carol Beth Anderson will read excerpts from their novels and answer audience questions. Signed books available for purchase. Family friendly. All ages welcome!

Amber Elby crafts a world that invokes the best of Terry Pratchett, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Neil Gaiman, all rooted in the mythology of Shakespeare. The Netherfeld series is a must read for lovers of magic, the inexplicable, and especially the timeless wonder conjured by the plays of William Shakespeare.
—Montgomery Sutton, Shakespearean Actor, Director, and Playwright 

Amber Elby is the author of three novels based on Shakespeare’s plays: Cauldron’s Bubble, Double Double Toil, and Trouble Fires Burn. In the last millennium, she was born in Grand Ledge, Michigan but spent much of her childhood in the United Kingdom. She began writing when she was three years old and created miniature books by asking her family how to spell every… single… word. Several years later, she saw her first Shakespearean comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, in London. Many years later, she studied Creative Writing at Michigan State University’s Honors College before earning her Master of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin. She enjoys watching Shakespearean performances with her husband and two daughters and divides her time between teaching at Austin Community College, traveling, and getting lost in imaginary worlds.

Carol Beth Anderson is a native of Arizona and now lives in Leander, TX. She has a husband, two kids, a miniature schnauzer, and more fish than anyone knows what to do with. Besides writing, she loves baking sourdough bread, knitting, and eating cookies-and-cream ice cream.

Join us in celebrating International Translation Day. Jennifer Rose Davis will discuss her new translation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano De Bergerac (which she is currently directing for a limited Austin run as a co-production between The Archive Theater and The Austin Scottish Rite Theater). Also featuring the presentation of the award of the Harvie Jordan fedora to AATIA Member of the Year. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF all books in translation all day on Sunday, September 29th!

Jennifer Rose Davis is a writer, director, actress, singer, musician, costumer, mask maker, artist, graphic designer, and all-around Renaissance woman who serves as the Managing Director for The Archive Theater. Her theatrical credits include Music Director, Costumer, and Set Designer for Der Bestrafte Brudermord with The Hidden Room. She was also Associate Costumer The Hidden Room’s The History of King Lear by Nahum Tate, for which she won an Austin Critic’s Table award. Jennifer designed costumes and danced Butoh for Still Now with Shrewd Productions. She created Tudor era costumes for Austin Shakespeare’s staged readings of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Hillary Mantle’s Wolf Hall, and Elizabethan costumes for The Merry Wives of Windsor co-produced by Austin Scottish Rite Theater and Weird Sisters. Her latest consuming project was creating costumes for the Zilker Summer Musical, The Little Mermaid.

Join us for an evening with Austin-based poet Usha Akella, who will be in conversation with Chaitali Sen.

Usha Akella has authored four books of poetry and one chapbook, and has scripted and produced one musical drama. Her latest poetry book was published by Sahitya Akademi, India’s highest literary authority, in 2019. She recently earned an 2018 MSt. in Creative Writing from Cambridge University, UK. Her work has been included in the Harper Collins’ Anthology of Indian English Poets. She was selected as a Creative Ambassador for the City of Austin for 2019 and 2015, and has been published in numerous literary journals. She is the founder of ‘Matwaala,’ the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the US. She has won literary prizes (Nazim Hikmet award, Open Road Review Prize, and Egan Memorial Prize), and earned finalist status in a few US based contests. She has written a few quixotic nonfiction prose pieces published in The Statesman and India Currents. She is the founder of the Poetry Caravan in New York and Austin, which takes poetry readings to the disadvantaged in women’s shelters, senior homes, and hospitals. Several hundreds of readings have reached these venues via this medium.

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.

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 Pitch Dark by Renata Adler.

Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland. Composed in the style of Renata Adler’s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist’s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art.

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 in celebrating the launch of Stephanie Goehring’s chapbook, from The Water [Inaudible] (Host Publications)—and Malvern’s sixth birthday!

Host Publications is honored to award Stephanie Goehring’s chapbook from The Water [Inaudible] as the recipient of the Fall 2019 Host Publications Chapbook Prize. Our chapbook prize embodies our values as a small, community-oriented press by elevating the voices of women writers. The prize awards publication, $1000, 25 copies of the published chapbook, a book launch at Malvern Books, and national distribution with energetic publicity and promotion.

Stephanie Goehring is the author of several poetry chapbooks. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and works at Malvern Books in Austin, TX.

In association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

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

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

This month’s Novel Night authors are Mark Falkin, Amy Gentry, and Jeff Abbott.

Mark will read from his post-apocalyptic novel The Late Bloomer; Amy will read from a psychological thriller, Last Woman Standing; and Jeff will read from The Three Beths, a psychologically intense suspense novel about a daughter’s desperate search for her missing mother.

Depicting an unspeakable apocalypse unlike any seen in fiction―there are no zombies, viruses or virals, no doomsday asteroid, no aliens, no environmental cataclysm, no nuclear holocaust―with a Holden Caulfieldesque protagonist at his world’s end, The Late Bloomer is both a companion piece to Lord of the Flies and a Bradburyian Halloween tale.

Mark Falkin is the author of the novels The Late Bloomer, Contract City, and Days of Grace. Born and raised in Tulsa, Mark graduated from Southern Methodist University then the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Working on his next novel, a tragicomedy set in Austin and Great Britain, he lives with his wife and daughters in Austin where he is a literary agent and recovering music attorney, having represented platinum sellers and Grammy winners alike. He used to vocalize in a band that rocked and rolled.

Dana Diaz is an aspiring stand‑up comedian—a woman in a man’s world. When she meets a tough computer programmer named Amanda Dorn, the two bond over their struggles in boys’ club professions. Dana confides that she’s recently been harassed and assaulted while in L.A., and Amanda comes up with a plan: they should go after each other’s assailants, Strangers on a Train–style. But Dana finds that revenge, however sweet, draws her into a more complicated series of betrayals. Soon her distrust turns to paranoia, encompassing strangers, friends—and even herself. At what cost will she get her vengeance? Who will end up getting hurt? And when it’s all over, will there be anyone left to trust?

Amy Gentry is the author of two psychological suspense novels, Good As Gone and Last Woman Standing, as well as a book of music criticism for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele. Amy holds a doctorate in English from the University of Chicago. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Salon, Paris Review, LA Review of Books, Austin Chronicle, and Electric Literature. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Abbott uses his skills as a master storyteller to convey a complicated and ambitious tale that seems straightforward but is full of twists and red herrings. He also keeps the story moving without falling into clichés or over-the-top revelations. The mystery works because of the terrific characters and the beautiful road map he unveils while navigating the reader through a complex landscape. ―The Washington Post

Jeff Abbott is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty suspense novels. His books have been selected as Summer Reads by The Today Show, Good Morning America, and USA Today. He has been a bestseller in the UK, France, and many other countries. His latest is The Three Beths.

Join us in celebrating the recent launch of Paul D. Dickinson’s Junker Dreams: An Automotive Memoir. With readings from Paul and special guest W. Joe Hoppe.

Full of grit, humor and a mystical urban romanticism, this debut book of prose from a poet soars through a landscape of broken hearts, broken machines, and the strident desire to live a fiercely uncommon life. From New Orleans to New York City and the miles of lost highway in between, Dickinson illuminates a colorful universe as it unfolds behind the wheel of these banged up yet beloved hunks of steel.

Paul D. Dickinson is a poet and musician, born in 1966 in St. Paul, MN. His writing has appeared in Conduit, City Pages, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Dickinson has been in three films: The Last City in the East; Tired Moonlight; and The Lake Street Detective. He is currently the host of the Riot Act Reading Series.

W. Joe Hoppe’s poems have appeared in Analecta, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, and The Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. His poems have been anthologized in Stand Up Poetry, How to be This Man, gumballpoetry.com, and Beatest State in the Union. He has hosted numerous poetry events at Austin’s Malvern Books, including interviews of local poets, a reading and discussion of Emily Dickinson, a communal performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl celebrating its 60th anniversary, and an annual memorial reading for the late, great Austin poet Albert Huffstickler. Hoppe is an Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.

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

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

This month’s theme is “Wildest Dreams”—this is my larger-than-life fantasy/nightmare. Our featured artists include: STEPHANIE WEBB, RON SEYBOLD, PAUL WEBSTER, NICOLE CORTICHIATO, TERRY DAWSON, JONATHAN WOODS, ROBERT CARRANZA, ILENE HADDAD, GARRET ANDERSON, TERESA Y. ROBERSON and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows intermission. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy. For more information, contact Samantha Wells at Samantha.wells@austincc.edu.

This month’s featured reader is Héctor Aguayo.

Héctor Aguayo has been published in literary magazines like Al Principio, El Cid, Reporte Austin, Rainbow Groove, and The Rio Review. He understood that by using his voice he would bring representation to the Chicano experience and the struggle of neither identifying as North American nor Mexican. He’s also a LGBTQIA advocate pursuing inclusivity.

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.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of Alisar Eido’s new novel, Wake of War. With readings from Alisar, and special guests Brennan Utley and Kendall Smith.

Alisar Eido’s third novel, Wake of War, is the final book of The Soulfire Series. Her work spans multiple genres including science fiction, psychological thrillers, dark fantasy, and realistic fiction. The author’s inspiration stems from her many experiences with strange coincidences and unexplainable events, as well as battles with mental illness. She currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her pens and pencils.

Brennan Utley is an emerging author based in Austin who blends realist, fabulist, science fiction, and satirical traditions into his unique and often darkly funny stories and novels. He is currently working late into the night on a handful of projects and teaches English in Bastrop, Texas.

Kendall Smith is a budding author born and raised in Austin, Texas. In the past, she’s been a ballerina, self-proclaimed chef, an avid gamer and an amateur podcast host. As a writer, she focuses on immersing her audience in realms where diverse experience leads to profound conflicts, the weak are stronger than they seem, the scenery is opulently feral, and fantasies are limitless.

Join us in celebrating the launch of poet Logan Fry’s new collection, Harpo Before the Opus. Logan will be joined by poet Caroline Gormley.

The poems begin where language fails, where speech becomes disembodied, and syntax skids to a stop that dissolves into gesture. Where its form reaches an end, formlessness offers a space ripe with possibility. Here we find Harpo, reaching into the frustrated endpoint of language to find a method for its resurrection. Fry sees that language becomes a tool for alienation and uses the poems in Harpo Before the Opus to excavate paths back to tenderness. These are poems from the edge, pulling language out from its failure and into a fervent interrogation of its possibilities. What was once a tool of capitalistic alienation now serves as material for building connections.

In spiraling explorations of rhetoric, these poems allow language to break from its prescribed structures, and instead, it becomes a gestural embrace of feeling and being. Fry utilizes a Marxist lens to scrutinize and reinvent the use of language. In Fry’s hands, language is rendered a visceral and sensual material, forming poems that are both deeply felt philosophical inquiries and wildly playful exercises of wit.

Logan Fry is the author of Harpo Before the Opus—selected by Srikanth Reddy as winner of Omnidawn’s 2018 1st/2nd Book Prize. He is founding editor of Flag + Void, and his poetry has appeared in venues including Fence, Prelude, New American Writing, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, and the Best American Experimental Writing anthology. He lives in Austin and teaches at Texas State University.

Caroline Gormley is an editor of Flag + Void. She attended Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College and currently works for an in-house creative agency. She has come out of poetry retirement for this very special reading with her husband, Logan.

Join us in celebrating the recent release of Vincent Cooper’s poetry collection Zarzamora. Vincent will be joined by Claudia Delfina Cardona and Laura Villareal.

Vincent Cooper is Chicano poet from Los Angeles, Ca. He is the author of Where the Reckless Ones Come to Die and Zarzamora—Poetry of Survival. His poetry can be found in Big Bridge Magazine, Huizache #6 and 8, AMP, Voices De La Luna, The Acentos Review, Riversedge Journal and Abstract Magazine. He currently resides in the westside of San Antonio.

Claudia Delfina Cardona is a tejana poet proudly born and raised in San Antonio. She received her MFA in Poetry at Texas State University this past spring. She is also the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of Chifladazine, an online and print publication that is dedicated to showcasing the creative work of Latinas and Latinxs. Her work can be found in Cosmonauts Avenue, Tinderbox Journal, and Apogee Journal.

Laura Villareal earned her MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of The Cartography of Sleep. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from Key West Literary Seminar and The Highlights Foundation.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Gabriella C. Cruz and Marilyse V. Figueroa.

Gabriella C. Cruz is a proud mama. Chicana. Poeta. “I use writing and poetry to explore the depths of my humanity and to connect to others and the natural world. Themes I gravitate toward include the lost and unspoken aspects of motherhood, fierce femininity, love, the cycles and wonder of nature and the human body, to birth and human rebirth manifested through personal growth. Sometimes I write about pancakes and spaghetti, too.” Her favorite flavor of ice cream is Death Metal by Chocolate from Sweet Ritual!

*** Our Halloween edition features spooky tunes, costume contests & prizes, plus, of course, candy and ice cream! ***

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

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

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

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 Magical Negro by Morgan Parker.

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics―of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present―timeless black melancholies and triumphs.

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 in celebrating the launch of Christopher Carmona’s new novel El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande. With readings from Christopher and his brother, author Juan P. Carmona.

El Rinche is a reimagining and flip of the script of an American popular culture icon. This novel tells the story a light-skinned Mexican American named Ascencion “Chonnie” Ruiz de Plata. He disguises himself as the ghost of a Texas Ranger on the South Texas border of Mexico now known as The Rio Grande Valley between 1905-1921. Together with his partner, the Native American Tal’dos, a Japanese ninja master, and the most successful U.S. Marshall of all time, Bass Reeves (the real lone ranger), Chonnie takes on the superhero persona of “El Rinche” to fight the villainous Texas Rangers and save the local peoples of the area.

Christopher Carmona is the author of The Road to Llorona Park, which won the 2016 NACCS Tejas Best Fiction Award and was listed as one of the top 8 Latinx books in 2016 by NBCNews. He was the inaugural writer-in-residence for the Langdon Review Writers Residency Program in 2015. He has three books of poetry: 140 Twitter Poems, I Have Always Been Here and beat. He co-edited The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writings with Chuck Taylor and Rob Johnson and Outrage: A Protest Anthology about Injustice in a Post 9/11 World with Rossy Evelin Lima. He has also co-written Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Poetics. Currently, he is working on 280: Poems from the Twitterverse and a series of YA novellas entitled El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande. The first book in this series is out now and is a 2019 Texas Institute of Letters Best Young Adult Book Finalist. He teaches at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Brownsville in Mexican American Studies and Creative Writing.

A September morning in 1989 changed the city of Alton’s history forever. At 7:34 a.m., a Dr. Pepper truck collided with Mission School Bus no. 6. After the bus and its occupants plunged into a water-filled caliche pit, 21 students lost their lives. Thirty years later, a new book reveals the impact of the Alton Bus Crash. The resulting aftermath was a small South Texas community flooded with reporters and lawyers. The heavily scrutinized legal battle divided the city, but it did ultimately produce changes in school bus safety that continue to save lives today. Juan P. Carmona navigates the complicated legacy of the tragic accident and its aftermath.

Juan P. Carmona is a Social Studies teacher at Donna High School and a Dual-Enrollment History Instructor through South Texas College. He graduated with honors from the American Military University with a Master’s degree in American History and was the recipient of the 2018 James F. Veninga Outstanding Teaching Humanities Award by Humanities Texas. His primary field of research is the history of South Texas borderlands.

Join us for a conversation between visiting translator Rosalind Harvey and host Sean Manning as they discuss topics such as translating voices, particularly in regards to her latest work Juan Pablo Villalobos’ The Other Side, a collection of stories from Central American teen refugees crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Their conversation will also be recorded for Adriana Pacheco’s Hablemos Escritoras podcast.

Rosalind Harvey (above left) is an award-winning literary translator, and has taught translation at undergraduate and postgraduate level at the universities of Roehampton, Bristol, and Warwick. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ debut novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and her translation of his work I’ll Sell You A Dog was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and commended for the 2018 Valle-Inclán prize. She has worked on books by Guadalupe Nettel, Elvira Navarro, Enrique Vila-Matas, Héctor Abad Faciolince, and Alberto Barrera Tyszka, amongst others. She is a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, an online community for early-career literary translators, and speaks regularly on the topic of getting into the profession and surviving. She is a 2016 Arts Foundation Fellow, and in 2018 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently working on a collection of Peruvian short stories and an Argentine play, and her latest publication is a YA title by Villalobos about the journeys made by teenage Central American immigrants when they cross over illegally to the United States. She lives in Coventry in the West Midlands.

Sean Manning (above center) is a Lecturer who teaches courses on language, literature, and writing in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his PhD in Spanish and Latin American Literature. He is also a literary translator and has translated numerous works including Eduardo Lalo’s The Elements, Azahara Palomeque’s American Poems, Carlos Pereda’s Lessons in Exile, and a collection of short stories from Lorenzo García Vega titled Falconry With Puppets. He is currently working on translations of Carlos Pereda’s latest book Destructions and Nomadic Thought and a novel by Argentine writer Diego Vecchio. He also co-edited No dicen nada, cantan, an anthology of poetry from the late Uruguayan poet and U.T. professor Enrique Fierro set to be published this year by Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Dr. Adriana Pacheco (above right) was born in Puebla, Mexico and is a naturalized American Citizen. She sits on and is former Chair at the International Board of Advisors at University of Texas-Austin. She is Affiliate Research Fellow at Llilas Benson, and co-founder of the Nineteenth-Century scholar section of LASA. Her research in the construction of feminine subjectivity from the nineteenth century onwards from the perspective of critical and postcolonial theories and cultural and historiographic studies has earned her multiple scholarships and grants. A Texas Book Festival Feature Author (2012), Dr. Pacheco has several publications in collective books and magazines like Revista de Estudios Hispánicos and Letras Libres, among others. Currently she is working on the book “Virile Angels,” Much More Than “Angels of the Home.” Female Education in Mexican Nineteenth-Century Catholic Newspapers and a collective Para seguir rompiendo con la palabra. Dramaturgas, cineastas, periodistas y ensayistas mexicanas contemporáneas. She is founder and producer of Hablemos Escritoras podcast and Proyecto Escritoras Mexicanas Contemporáneas.

Hablemos Escritoras podcast is a weekly podcast that focuses on the work, influences, publications, awards, and trajectory of contemporary female writers and translators of Spanish, and explores topics related to literature, culture, and society. In its more than 70 episodes it has interviewed authors from around the world. It can be heard on Soundcloud, Applepodcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

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 Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt, an enchanting send-up of the world of opera.

Diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced “Mardu Gorgeous”) bursts like the most brilliant of comets onto the international opera scene, only to confront the deadly malice and black magic of her rivals. Outrageous and uproarious, flamboyant and serious as only the most perfect frivolity can be, James McCourt’s entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master.

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 association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

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

Join us in celebrating the release of Jessica Reisman’s first short story collection, The Arcana of Maps.

The Arcana of Maps should be at the top of everyone’s must-read lists. Jessica Reisman’s unique lyrical voice powers some of the finest short fiction of this (and really any) century.”—Richard Klaw, editor of Rayguns Over Texas and The Apes of Wrath

This first collection of Jessica Reisman’s stories roves the liminal spaces between now and not-quite-now, dream and waking, futures far flung and fantastic. Here are tales of adventure and transformation, clockwork detectives and polar bears, a wild sea on a space station, alien salvage and revenants. Featuring 16 previously published works and one unique to the collection, these stories open obscure doors into fantastic otherwheres and whens, conjuring worlds with deft and evocative lyricism.

Jessica Reisman‘s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her far future science fiction adventure novel Substrate Phantoms came out from Resurrection House Books in 2017. She grew up on the east coast of the U.S., was a teenager on the west coast, and now lives in Austin, Texas. She’s been a writer, animal lover, reader, and movie aficionado since she was a wee child.

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 guest is Varian Johnson.

Varian Johnson is the author of nine novels, including The Parker Inheritance, which was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, an Odyssey Honor Audiobook and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor Book; and The Great Greene Heist, which was named to over twenty-five state reading and best-of lists. He received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he now serves as a member of the faculty. Varian lives outside of Austin, TX with his family.

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 us for an evening with Dobby Gibson and Fernando Flores.

Dobby Gibson’s new book of poetry is Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press), which received a starred review from Shelf Awareness, and which The Washington Post calls “smart and crisp.” He is the author of three previous collections, including It Becomes You (Graywolf Press), which was shortlisted for The Believer Poetry Award. A recent visiting poet at UT-Austin, he lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and raised in the U.S. In 2018 his short story collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas was released by Host Publications. His debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, was released in 2019 and was one of Lit Hub and The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019 and one of Buzzfeed and Tor.com‘s Books to Read This Spring!

Join us in celebrating the recent launch of John Domini’s fourth novel, The Color Inside a Melon. With readings from John and special guest Lowell Mick White.

The Color Inside a Melon appeared this summer. Blurbs came from Salman Rushdie and Marlon James, and the Washington Post praised the book as “sage” and spry,” The Millions as “stunning” and “poetic.” Set in Naples, Italy, the novel completes a loose trilogy. Domini also has three books of stories, the latest MOVIEOLA!, which The Millions called “a new shriek for a new century.” His criticism has appeared in the New York Times and elsewhere, and is collected in The Sea-God’s Herb. His awards include an NEA Fellowship and an Iowa Major Artist Grant.

Lowell Mick White is the author of six books: novels Normal School and Professed and Burnt House and That Demon Life, and story collections Long Time Ago Good and The Messes We Make of Our Lives. A winner of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, White teaches at Texas A&M University.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy. This month’s featured reader is Ehigbor Shultz.

Ehigbor Shultz (B.A. Plan II Honors, Neurolinguistics, English, Cert. Chemistry, Pre-Medical studies, UT Austin ’16) is a multi-ethnic writer. Although she is now based in Austin, she has travelled and lived in many different places around the world and is multilingual as a result. She writes African mythology based YA epic fantasy, YA and adult contemporary fiction, thriller mysteries, and heartfelt poetry. She writes for all the unseen, marginalized girls and women who grew up seeing too much of the world’s pain and receiving its burdens. You may not know her name in publishing, but she hopes one day you will. She hopes that those who read and hear her work can take a piece of it with them and allow it to color their worlds and perspectives. She’s always up for a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, and is happy to provide you one as well, should you so need it.

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

This month’s Novel Night authors are H. Claire Taylor and Jonathan Woods.

A reluctant messiah. A power-hungry preacher. The hilarious battle for hearts and minds is only beginning… Jessica McCloud knows firsthand that it’s impossible to fit in when you’re God’s only begotten daughter. While the girl possesses the power to smite and a direct line to the Almighty, she’d give it all up for a few more friends … or a reliable set of God-proof earplugs…

H. Claire Taylor is the author of the Jessica Christ series, a comedy about the life of God’s only begotten daughter, and has published over two dozen novels under various pen names. When she’s not writing, you can find her buried in a book, thinking deeply about ghosts, or soaking up the Texas sun.

Like Hunter S. Thompson crossbred with Gil Brewer, Woods revels in paranoia, hallucinations, hapless saps, and language both playful and profane. Exuberantly shotgunning pulp-fiction clichés (from Mexican sojourns to Nazi scientists), he slathers on film noir homage and shakes until it explodes like the radioactive suitcase at the end of Kiss Me Deadly. Pulpy, pervy fun for those who like the wild stuff. —Keir Graff, Booklist

Jonathan Woods lives a pulp fiction existence in the Texas hill country. He is the author of the
Spinetingler Award winner Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem; A Death in Mexico; Phone Call from Hell and Other Tales of the Damned; and Kiss the Devil Good Night. His new novel Hog Wild is forthcoming.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Esteban Rodríguez‘s new poetry collection, Crash Course. With readings from Esteban and special guest ire’ne lara silva.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press 2019), In Bloom (SFASU Press 2020), and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press 2020). His poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for PANK and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

ire’ne lara silva is the author of three poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), and CUICACALLI/House of Song (Saddle Road Press, 2019), 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.

Join us for an afternoon with poet T.D. Walker, who will read from her recent collection, Small Waiting Objects. With special guests August Huerta and Holly Lyn Walrath.

In the near future, kitchen appliances question, console, and bewilder their owners. Extraterrestrials leave behind sub-dermal implants and complicated daughters. A second moon settles into orbit around Earth, a moon which challenges those beneath it to see it, to name it, to explore it. And crew members aboard starships turn to fine and pulp art as consolation. The lyric poems in Small Waiting Objects reach back to feminist utopias and onward toward possible futures in which we find ourselves resisting the technologies-and their human implications-that we most desire.

“Are we really just one generation away from seismograph implants, or does it just feel that way? Like a second moon, T.D. Walker’s eerie, speculative poems may cause readers to recalibrate themselves. Let this book be your bus to Oz.”
— Jessy Randall

T.D. Walker is the author of Small Waiting Objects (CW Books 2019), a collection of near-future science fiction poems. Her poems and stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, The Future Fire, Web Conjunctions, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Recompose, Abyss & Apex, Kaleidotrope, The Stonecoast Review, and elsewhere. After completing graduate work in English Literature, Walker began her career as a software developer. She draws on both her grounding in literary studies and her experience as a computer programmer in writing poetry and fiction.

August Huerta is a poet based in Austin, Texas. They are a graduate from The New Writers Project and have been featured in Raspa Magazine and Strange Horizons, where you can find their poem “Concerning Jimmy Carter and the UFO Sighting.”

Holly Lyn Walrath’s poetry and short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Luna Station Quarterly, Liminality, and elsewhere. She is the author of the Elgin Award winning chapbook Glimmerglass Girl (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver.

Join us for a night with spoken word artists Joaquín Zihuatanejo and Taria Person.

Joaquín Zihuatanejo is a brilliant poet. His testimonials and songs and explorations are multilingual, structurally adventurous. The wide range of forms and dictions makes visible his ravenous curiosity and intellect. His language, rippling with the loss of a father and racial and cultural tensions, resists one-dimensional answers. His nouns and verbs wonder, croon, weep, question, and roar. The deep attention to language and to the shaping of language infuses the work with a riveting self-awareness of the self—in this case, a Mexican American man unafraid to remember, to love. Beautifully crafted and richly imagined, Arsonist is a remarkable debut. —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning

Joaquín Zihuatanejo received his MFA in creative writing with a concentration in Poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work has been featured in Prairie Schooner, Sonora Review, and Huizache, among other journals and anthologies. His poetry has been featured on HBO, NBC, and on NPR in Historias and The National Teacher’s Initiative. He was the winner of the Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry. His book, Arsonist, was published by Anhinga Press in September of 2018, and was short-listed as a Finalist for both the Writers’ League of Texas Best Book Poetry Prize and the International Latino Book Award Best Book Poetry Prize. Joaquín has two passions in his life, his wife Aída and poetry, always in that order.

Taria Person is an alumna of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she received a dual B.A. in English Creative Writing: Poetry, and Interdisciplinary Studies: Africana Studies. She is the author of Rainbow Elephant and At the Summit, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including: O’ Woman a Tapestry of Loving You, and Voices of Warriors: Poems of Hope & Healing. Taria Person won first place at the regional Big Ears: Spoken Word Expo/The 5th Woman Poetry Slam (2017), the Regional Southern Fried Hip-Hop Slam (2013), and Knoxville Poetry Slam (2012). Also, she has been an actress and Production Stage Manager for The Carpetbag Theatre Inc., during its original series of stage productions that have been funded by The Roy Cockrum Foundation, in celebration of (CBT’s) 50th Anniversary. Recently, Person has been commissioned to write a book of poetry by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation; won an Artistic Professional Development grant from Alternate Roots for her original stage play, Hangers; and became a member of the 5th Woman Touring Collective.

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 Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo.

In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a “magician and a master” (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.

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 in celebrating the launch of Roberto Ontiveros’ debut story collection, The Fight for Space.

In his debut collection, The Fight for Space, Roberto Ontiveros explores the modes of art and obsession with eleven stories that run from fabulist comedy to surrealist noir. The tales—focusing on the inner lives of adult caregivers, delivery drivers, and painters—trace how the ubiquity of media (the world of sitcoms, talk radio, and superhero comics) comes to flood the working class with a dream-like dread. In this book, a budding con artist tries to sell a house that does not belong to her, an anti-social memoirist pens the fates of his friends, and a comic book-obsessed warehouse employee follows a man who wears a gas mask. Atmospheric and erotic, the stories in The Fight for Space recall the literary mysteries of James M. Cain by way of Twin Peaks.

Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, literary critic and journalist. Some of his work has appeared the Threepenny Review, the Santa Monica Review, the Believer Magazine, and Huizache. He is working on a novel and a collection of interlinking stories. He is the proud father of Maximo Spinoza Ontiveros.

The Rio Review Release party is a fun-filled gathering where students, writers, and creative minds alike come together to celebrate the publication of the newest anthology of ACC’s Student Literary and Arts Journal, The Rio Review!

The Rio Review is a student-run journal that showcases a collection of poetry, prose, and artwork submitted and published by talented ACC students every Fall and Spring semester.

This soirée is not only a party to celebrate the newest edition of The Rio Review, but it is also a perfect opportunity to meet and network with other writers and artists in the area while enjoying refreshments, artwork, and student readings!

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

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

This month’s selection is Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi.

“This novel is a masterpiece. From the opening sentences, he is drawing on nuance and subtle detail; comedy and pathos. Every gesture speaks volumes…..for all the humour and the easy comedy this lively study of small life is as profound as a prayer, as subtle as a lament.” —The Irish Times

It is 1900, give or take a few years. The Vajkays live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house. Both are utterly enthralled with their daughter, Skylark. Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives.

Now Skylark is going away, for one week only, it’s true, but a week that yawns endlessly for her parents. What will they do? Before they know it, they are eating at restaurants, reconnecting with old friends, attending the theater. And this is just a prelude to Father’s night out at the Panther Club, about which the less said the better. Drunk, in the light of dawn Father surprises himself and Mother with his true, buried, unspeakable feelings about Skylark. Then, Skylark is back…

Is there a world beyond the daily grind and life’s creeping disappointments? Kosztolányi’s crystalline prose, perfect comic timing, and profound human sympathy conjure up a tantalizing beauty that lies on the far side of the ordinary. To that extent, Skylark is nothing less than a magical book.

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 association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

This month we have two featured guests: Skip Bellon and David Romero.

Skip Bellon writes, “I am lucky enough to have had 3 distinctly different families. My biological family, the dairy farm next door with 5 sons (my home away from home), and a nursery/summer camp where I lived from 8am to 5pm every summer weekday from the age of 2 until I turned 13, and was too old to attend anymore. Shout out to Mr John and Mrs Lee, the owner/operators. My mother and father worked hard, and a lot, which left me plenty of time to read and fall in love with words. My camp time gave me lots of experience observing people and families. Farm life taught me what was really true in the world and that’s where I developed a strong love for animals, which was fostered to a large extent by my father. A strong love of animals was the single thing my father and I had in common. I struggled through my teens and then discovered my potential (in life) during my 5 years in the US Navy. I have been observing and writing poems ever since. I added short stories to my repertoire around my mid-forties, and now I enjoy writing stories more than poetry, but still write both. Writing, my life long hobby, is currently trying to work its way into the main arena. Its only obstruction now is me.”

David Romero is a local singer/songwriter influenced by English, Irish, Scottish, and American folk music. He sings in Spanish as well and plays acoustic guitar, dulcimer, and other stringed instruments often accompanied by his wife Ann Marie on flute. His song “Absence Inside” was featured in VSA Texas’ 2017 Veteran music compilation The Re-Integration Project {Sounds}.

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

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

THE AUSTIN WRITERS ROULETTE presents its GRAND FINALE event, “Creative Contemplations”—these are the things I’ll be dreaming and scheming for 2020. This special lineup includes artists from across the 8 years of Rouletter spoken word, music and storytelling: ALLYSON WHIPPLE, LARRY MAYFIELD, BIRDMAN 313, DONNA DECHEN BIRDWELL, JIM TENNY, DANIEL DAVILA, HOPE RUIZ, RG HOOK, NICOLE CORTICHIATO, PAUL NORMANDIN, BRENNAN UTLEY, STEPHANIE WEBB, URSULA PIKE, TERESA Y. ROBERSON & THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month we’re proud to present Professor Joe Hoppe’s Poetry & Prose Class reading their work as the final literary event of 2019.

Join us for an evening with writers Carmen Gray and William Jensen. They’ll be sharing excerpts from short stories that appear in Road Kill Volume IV: Texas Horror by Texas Writers.

Carmen Gray is a teacher, Master Reiki practitioner, and writer who lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her published work in the Naga Review online, on her blog walkersonthejourney.com, in Poet’s Choice and in Road Kill, Volume I. Her latest short fiction piece, “The Smoke’s Gotta Go Somewhere,” is in the fall 2019 edition of Road Kill Volume IV: Texas Horror by Texas Writers.

William Jensen is the author of the novel Cities of Men. His short fiction has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Texas Review, Tinge Magazine, and elsewhere. He has received multiple Pushcart nominations. His story, “You Can Outrun The Devil if You Try,” is in the fall 2019 edition of Road Kill Volume IV: Texas Horror by Texas Writers. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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

This month’s Novel Night authors are Samantha Inman and Bennett Donovan.

A thirty-five year cold case lands on her desk after a violent encounter left Alena Martin scarred. Not knowing where to start, she chooses a different perspective altogether, but the case follows her to the ancient city of Alexandria, Egypt when two women go missing. With no time on her side Detective Martin must ask the right questions and save herself in the process or she loses everything in the sound of a gunshot.

Samantha Inman has a bachelors degree in Theatre, and an extensive background and love for the arts. She published her debut novel in the summer of 2019 and is already working on future projects.

Two aspiring artists meet at a backyard party in Austin. They form a bond and agree to an adventure that will change their lives forever. What follows is a white-knuckle odyssey deep into the Texas Hill Country. Faced with a series of unforeseen obstacles, Conor and Emma must not only survive the harsh landscape but also confront the very nature of the relationship that they are forging.

Bennett Donovan came to Austin in 1991 and became the cliche of the UT student who never leaves. He’s gone through a few versions of himself from Dean of Students at Kirby Hall School to teaching history at UT, ACC, and St. Ed’s to working for the successful local tech startup Convio. He’s currently a Director in the non-profit division of the San Francisco tech giant Salesforce. Devil’s Sinkhole is Bennett’s first novel. Reviewers have called it an “intelligent, entertaining short novel,” a “philosophical thriller… in which the action is just as important as the stream of ideas,” and “sharp, deep, and… darkly funny.”

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women and nonbinary writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month we’re welcoming Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and our I Screamers are KB, Faylita Hicks, and Alana Torrez.

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

KB [they/them] is a Black queer nonbinary poet, editor, and educator currently based in Austin, TX. They’ve received fellowship invitations from the Vermont Studio Center, Lambda Literary, The Hurston/Wright Foundation, and others. Their poetry appears in The Cincinnati Review, The Matador Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Shade Journal, and elsewhere. When they’re not on stage or in the page, they serve as Program Coordinator for the Gender and Sexuality Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Curator/Host of ATX Interfaces, Assistant Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and proud member of Lenguas Locxs Writers Collective. They’re currently the Spring 2020 guest editor for Foglifter Press. Their favorite flavor of ice cream is pecan pralines & cream.

Faylita Hicks (she/her/they) is the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), Managing Editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, an organizer with Mano Amiga, and a finalist for the 2018 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship. Hicks was a 2019 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow for Nonfiction, a 2019 Jack Jones Literary Arts “Culture, Too” Conference Gender/Sexuality Fellow, a 2019 Palette Poetry Spotlight Award Finalist, a winner of Catapult’s 2019 Black History Month Scholarship, and has received a residency from the Vermont Studio Center, and is a 2020 Tin House Winter Workshop Creative Nonfiction Fellow. Their work is published or forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Adroit, Linden Avenue, Foglifter, The Rumpus, Sundog Lit, The Cincinnati Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, SLATE Magazine, Huffington Post, Texas Observer, Color Bloq, and others. Their favorite flavor of ice cream is banana brownie!

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

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

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

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

Join us for a poetry reading to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park, Albert Huffstickler. With M.C. Sylvia Manning.

Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was born in Laredo, Texas, but he lived in Austin in his later years, and became a local literary legend. You could usually find him in a café in Hyde Park, decked out in suspenders, smoking, drinking coffee, and working on a poem. (Rumor has it he wrote a poem a day, and his impressive publication record—four full-length collections, plus hundreds of poems published in chapbooks and journals—lends veracity to the story.) He was a two-time winner of the Austin Book Awards, and in 1989 the state legislature formally honored him for his contribution to Texas poetry. In May 2013 a new Hyde Park green space at the corner of 38th and Duval Streets was named Huffstickler Green in his honor. Huff was a friend and inspiration to many, and everyone who knew him talks of his kindness, his honesty, and his passionate support for local literature. Austin Community College English professor W. Joe Hoppe describes his friend and mentor as “a great encourager of poetry.”

You’re invited to join us for another Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s theme is Reconciliation and our guests are Sandra Sidi, Carrie Fountain, Josh Denslow, and The Flyin’ A’s (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.

Sandra Sidi writes fiction and nonfiction. She was a military analyst in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008. She is an MFA Candidate at Texas State University San Marcos, and holds a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Yale University. Her first piece, “Get A Weapon,” was published in The Atlantic and is forthcoming in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: An Anthology by Kendall Hunt Publishing. She is working on a novel about Israeli soldiers.

Carrie Fountain is a poet and novelist, and serves as the 2019 Texas Poet Laureate. She is the author of two poetry collections, Instant Winner and Burn Lake, winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Award, and the YA novel I’m Not Missing. Her first children’s book, The Poem Forest (Candlewick Press, 2020) tells the story of American poet W.S. Merwin and the palm forest he grew from scratch on the island of Maui. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and The New Yorker, among many others. She is the host of KUT’s This Is Just to Say, a radio show and podcast where she has intimate conversations on the writing life with other poets and writers. Fountain is writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University, and lives in Austin, TX.

Josh Denslow’s short stories have appeared in print and online in such fine places as Barrelhouse, Third Coast, Cutbank, Wigleaf, and Black Clock, among many others. NOT EVERYONE IS SPECIAL, his debut short story collection, will be published in 2019 by 7.13 Books. Along with his wife and his brother-in-law, he plays drums in the band Borrisokane. KUTX called us “synth-punk gloom-wonders” and the band was hailed by the Austin Chronicle as one of the Best New Local Acts of 2013. They are currently recording thier first full-length album.

The Flyin’ A’s perform Americana with a Texas Kick. This husband and wife duo hails from Austin, Texas. You can hear their Texas roots in all they do. The high energy duo is famous for their top-notch songwriting, breathtaking harmonies, and exceptional live performance. Their latest album You Drive Me Crazy was selected to be on the 2017 first round Grammy Ballot and has taken them on tour around the US, UK, and the EU, and now they are headed to NZ for the first time. From Stuart Adamson’s outstanding lead guitar work and gritty vocals to Hilary Claire Adamson’s powerhouse vocal gymnastics and lilting harmonies, it is no wonder this duo is quickly gaining momentum both at home and abroad. They combine the best of Texas country, southern blues, folk and gospel to create an original sound that is all their own.

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 muted blood by mónica teresa ortiz.

To read mónica teresa ortiz’s muted blood, we unwrap our depleted ear, we open space and breath for our unruly ones, we write letters into the future and underneath the surface with our dearly beloved poet ghosts. This is a poetry which defies demarcated boundaries, which demands deep listening and honoring of the dead, which celebrates our small sweet bursts of joy. —Ching-In Chen

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 Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell.

This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.

“A literary jewel of eccentricity seen as an ethical provocation, which created an unforgettable shock at a time when the mental stereotype imposed by the dictatorship was dimly trying to find the first slits for a breakthrough….The writer summons, in an artistic undertaking that is ever vigorous and vibrant, the fundamental questions of existence, the ephemeral and the transcendent stimulating each other in a dynamic exchange of energy, with original and seductive accords of lasting resonance.” —Norman Manea

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 association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

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

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

This month’s Novel Night authors are Marc Grossberg and Glen Larum. Marc will be reading from legal thriller The Best People. Glen will introduce his modern western, Waltz Against the Sky.

A legal drama and social satire set after Enron and before the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, The Best People portrays a Houston as it is: a glitzy meritocracy populated with larger-than-life characters. It is the landscape where the country-club and café-society sets clash amidst clever legal maneuvering, big law firm politics, a Ponzi scheme, and judicial corruption.

Marc Grossberg is an observer and a listener. He has a passion for his family, friends and clients, and for books that entertain and provoke him. He has practiced law in his native Houston for over fifty years. Somehow he overcame being a Board Certified tax lawyer and one of the Best Lawyers in America© to write The Best People. Marc is a proud product of the Houston public schools, the University of Houston, and the University of Texas School of Law. He lives in the NOW and goes wherever his “green light” tells him the intersection might be interesting.

Larum’s West Texas–based debut novel offers interconnected tales of murder and mayhem . . . Larum had a career as a newspaper editor in the West, and it shows; it’s clear that he knows what the particular emptiness of the region feels like—and he makes readers feel it, too . . . An excellent book about desperate people carefully depicted in minute detail. —starred Kirkus review

Glen Larum was born on an eastern Montana ranch just before the midway mark of the last century. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Montana Western and went on to become an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor in Montana, Colorado, and Texas before becoming a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Transportation’s Odessa District until his retirement in 2010, when he was commended for his contributions to state and community in an official Resolution (H.R. 128) of the Texas House of Representatives. His debut novel, Waltz Against the Sky, is set in West Texas in the 1970s, somewhere between Odessa-Midland and the Rio Grande. He feels most at home in places like that, where you can see both where you’ve been and where you are going, the legacy of a childhood spent on the Montana prairie. He and his wife, Pat, a retired psychotherapist, have ceased wandering and now live in a secluded corner of far southeast Austin, a few short steps away from the open spaces of a state park.

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

We’d like to invite you to join our brand-new Suspense & Speculation Book Club, a group for those of you interested in reading and discussing our mystery, suspense, and sci-fi/fantasy titles.

Our very first book will be Christopher Brown’s Rule of Capture, the first volume in an explosive legal thriller series set in the dystopian world of Brown’s Tropic of Kansas.

“Christopher Brown looks to be cornering the market on future dystopias… Rule of Capture is not just sci-fi, it’s also a legal thriller. Its author is himself a lawyer, just like John Grisham, and he has a grip on detail that full-time sci-fi authors can’t match.”—The Wall Street Journal

“A legal thriller set in a bureaucratic dystopia as grim as anything imagined by J.G. Ballard or William Gibson.”—Texas Monthly

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 Sunday, January 12th, at 1pm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join us for a night of chaps and broads reading chap(book)s and broad(side)s! Featuring Julie Poole, Stephanie Goehring, Leticia Urieta, Katy Chrisler, Alfredo Aguilar, and C. Prudence Arceneaux.

Julie Poole (top row, left) received a MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, CutBank, The Texas Observer, and Denver Quarterly. Her first book Bright Specimen was inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources center at UT and will be published by Deep Vellum in Spring 2021.

Stephanie Goehring (top row, middle) is the author of several poetry chapbooks. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and works at Malvern Books in Austin, TX.

Leticia Urieta (top row, right) is proud Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She works as a teaching artist in the Austin community. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her chapbook, The Monster, is out now from LibroMobile Press.

Katy Chrisler (bottom row, left) received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held residencies with Land Arts of the American West and 100 West Corsicana. Recent work of hers has appeared in Tin House, Conflict of Interest, The Volta, and Black Warrior Review. She currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Alfredo Aguilar (bottom row, middle) is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is the author of the chapbook What Happens On Earth (BOAAT Press 2018). He is a winner of 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Frost Place. His work has appeared in The Shallow Ends, Best New Poets 2017, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Originally from North County San Diego, he now resides in Texas.

C. Prudence Arceneaux (bottom row, right), a native Texan, teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, including Limestone, New Texas, Whiskey Island Magazine, Hazmat Review and Inkwell. A chapbook of her work, DIRT (2017), was awarded the Jean Pedrick Prize.

Join us in celebrating the release of Wendy Barker’s seventh full-length collection of poems, GLOSS. With readings from Wendy, as well as special guests Van G. Garrett and Michael Anania.

Posing haunting questions about the background of Barker’s British mother, GLOSS  includes poems in a variety of forms that meditate on a Chinese scroll and on inherited pieces of silver. Other poems “gloss” family memories to reveal underlying meanings of inherited stories, as the book builds to reveal disturbing facts long hidden.

Wendy Barker’s sixth collection of poetry, One Blackbird at a Time, received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry (BkMk Press, 2015). Her fifth chapbook is Shimmer (Glass Lyre Press, 2019). An anthology of poems about the 1960s, Far Out: Poems of the ’60s, co-edited with Dave Parsons, was released by Wings Press in 2016. Other books include a selection of poems with accompanying essays, Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co., 2002), and a selection of translations, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems, co-translated with Saranindranath Tagore, Braziller, 2001. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Southern Review, Nimrod, New Letters, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Plume,as well as The Best American Poetry 2013. She is the author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), as well as co-editor (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). Recipient of NEA and Rockefeller fellowships among other awards, she is the Pearl LeWinn Endowed Chair and Poet-in-Residence at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982. Wendy is married to the critic, biographer, essayist, and poet Steven G. Kellman.

Van G. Garrett is the winner of the 2017 Best Book of African American Poetry for his book, 49: Wings and Prayers, as announced by the Texas Association of Authors. Garrett is the author of Songs in Blue Negritude (poetry), The Iron Legs in the Trees (fiction), 49: Wings and Prayers (poetry), LENNOX IN TWELVE (poetry), HOG (poetry), ZURI: Love Songs (poetry), and Water Bodies (fall 2019).

Michael Anania is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. His published work includes twelve collections of poetry, among them Selected Poems (1994), In Natural Light (1999), Heat Lines (2006), and Nightsongs and Clamors (2018). His work is widely anthologized and has been translated into Italian, German, French, Spanish and Czech. He has also published a novel, The Red Menace, and a collection of essays, In Plain Sight. He has received a number of awards and fellowships, including the Charles Angoff Award and the Aniello Lauri Award for poems in this collection. Anania was poetry editor of Audit, a quarterly, founder and co-editor of Audit/Poetry, poetry and literary editor of The Swallow Press, poetry editor of Partisan Review and a contributing editor to Tri-Quarterly, and has served as an advisory editor to a number of other magazines and presses. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the faculty in writing at Northwestern University. He also taught at SUNY at Buffalo and the University of Chicago. He lives in Austin, Texas, and on Lake Michigan.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women and nonbinary writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Maritza De La Peña, Alisha Jilly Roff, and Dorienne Elston.

Maritza De La Peña is a poet native to Texas. She has recently returned after three years of living in a small mountain village in Ukraine, where she worked with educators and co-founded an annual writing and leadership camp for children and teens. She probably writes too many poems about snow and hanging out at the river and watching the village cows now. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is pistachio!

Alisha Jilly Roff: For Alisha, writing is an avocation. Her vocation, her craft, is walking into the darkness of someone else’s trauma and holding a hand, perhaps leading a soul back to the light. That is her hope for her legacy. She is a survivor, not a recognized writer. She has a rage, a passion that churns beneath her skin. It’s a passion that makes her want to scream so loud that buildings shake, trees bend, and stars tremble at the sound. Since that is not a possibility, she writes. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is pistachio, pure and simple!

Dorienne Elston: Like most writers, Dorienne has adored words for as long as she can remember. She first published a poem of hers at age 13, wrote scripts for a youth television series, composed short stories, wrote lyrics … and penned several long, dry, academic research papers in Grad School! The common thread, of course, is her love for words and how they are both the common and miraculous carriers of meaning from one mind to another, from one heart to another and, best of all, from one soul to another. In this new season of her life, Dorienne is returning to this first love and feels very privileged to share her recent work with you tonight. It is her hope that her words resonate with you and, of course, if she’s very lucky, touches your souls. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla Swiss almond!

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

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

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

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 Scorpionic Sun by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, translated by Conor Bracke.

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles.

“Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s poems speak from 1969 to the present with urgency, through an explosively anachronistic act of translation by Conor Bracken. As Khaïr-Eddine writes in ‘Black Nausea,’ the poems ‘offer to the future this weird / fruit / which speaks in the mouths / of the thousands of innocents dead / in our black blood.’ The distortive energies of Khaïr-Eddine’s ‘linguistic guerilla war’ agitate for a politically convulsive poetry that dares to be strange, spastic and abjectly sublime. This is a return of a political surrealism when its convulsive bloom is most needed.” —Johannes Göransson

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 in celebrating the Austin launch of Sarah Rose Etter’s debut novel, The Book of X, which has received praise from Roxane Gay (“utterly unique and remarkable”), Carmen Maria Machado (“gorgeous…heartbreaking”), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune (“powerful”).

Sarah Rose Etter is the author of Tongue Party, selected by Deb Olin Unferth as the winner of the Caketrain Press award, and The Book of X, her first novel, which is available from Two Dollar Radio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cut, Electric Literature, Guernica, VICE, New York Tyrant, Juked, Night Block, The Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Collagist, and more.

Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Bring friends—join the celebration! The event is free of charge and open to everyone. Copies will be available for purchase on-site.

Borderlands is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kiran Bhat’s new novel, we of the forsaken world…

In a distant corner of the globe, a man journeys to the birthplace of his mother, a tourist town destroyed by an industrial spill. In a nameless remote tribe, the chief’s second son is born, creating a scramble for succession as their jungles are being destroyed by loggers. In one of the world’s sprawling metropolises, a homeless one-armed woman sets out to take revenge upon the men who trafficked her. And, in a small village of shanty shacks connected only by a mud-and- concrete road, a milkmaid watches the girls she calls friends destroy her reputation.

In we of the forsaken world… Kiran Bhat tells the stories of four worlds falling apart, through the structure of four linguistic chains, comprised of the accounts of four people witnessing the decline of these worlds, in four acts. Like modern communication networks, these 16 stories connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable of its own, into the mind of a distinct human being. These are the tales of not just sixteen strangers, but many different lives, who live on this planet, at every second, everywhere.

Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital nomad, he has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. His list of homes is vast, but he considers Mumbai the only place of the moment worth settling down in. He currently lives in Melbourne.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Chad Bennett’s debut poetry collection, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era, selected by Ocean Vuong for Sarabande Books’ Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. With readings from local poets, including Lisa Moore, Cindy St. John, Desiree Morales, Austin Rodenbiker, and Sequoia Maner.

Shirley Temple tap dancing at the Kiwanis Club, Stevie Nicks glaring at Lindsey Buckingham during a live version of “Silver Springs,” Frank Ocean lyrics staking new territory on the page: this is a taste of the cultural landscape sampled in Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era. Chad Bennett casually combines icons of the way we live now—GIFs, smartphones, YouTube—with a classical lover’s lament. The result is certainly a deeply personal account of loss, but more critically, a dismantling of an American history of queerness. “This is our sorrow. Once it seemed theirs, but now it’s ours. They still inhabit it, yet we say it’s ours.” All at once cerebral, physical, personal, and communal, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era constructs a future worth celebrating.

Chad Bennett’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Offing, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Volta, and elsewhere. He is the author of Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry, a study of twentieth century poetry and the queer art of gossip. Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era, his first book of poems, was selected by Ocean Vuong for Sarabande Books’ Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

Lisa L. Moore is the author of Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and has published four other books of feminist and queer writing and criticism. In addition to her chapbook 24 Hours of Men, Lisa Moore’s poems have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, The Fourth River, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, and other periodicals. She is Archibald A. Hill Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Director of the Program in LGBTQ Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Cindy St. John is the author of Dream Vacation, a collection of daybook entries and poems; I Wrote This Poem, a poetry chapbook illustrated by Michael Burkard; as well as three other chapbooks. She lives in Austin, TX.

Desiree Morales is a poet and educator in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in What Rough Beast, Conflict of Interest, and the forthcoming I Scream Social Anthology. She grew up in Southern California and plans to never stop talking about it.

Austin Rodenbiker’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House Online, Prelude, Narrative, and PRISM international. He received his MFA from the New Writers Project and he holds an MA in gender studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Sequoia Maner is a poet and Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University. She is coeditor of the book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, January 2020). Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in venues such as The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “upon reading the autopsy of Sandra Bland” was a finalist for the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize and she is at work on a critical manuscript about the history of African American Elegy.

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 Red Shift by Alan Garner.

In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.

Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as Mow Cop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe: all these come together in Alan Garner’s extraordinary Red Shift, a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening and destructive madness.

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 association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

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

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

We’d like to invite you to join our Suspense & Speculation Book Club, a group for those of you interested in reading and discussing our mystery, suspense, and sci-fi/fantasy titles.

This month’s title is Dread Journey by Dorothy B. Hughes.

Dread Journey is a taut thriller that exemplifies Dorothy B. Hughes’s greatest strengths as a writer—namely, her sharpened prose and mastery of psychological suspense. While its fine-tuned plot is just as exciting as it was in 1945, when the novel was first published, and its portrayal of Hollywood’s less savory elements remains all-too-relevant today, the book’s characters and setting provide pure Golden Age fare, sure to please any devotee of classic mystery novels.

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 Sunday, February 9th.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month’s featured reader is Jeremy Garrett.

Jeremy Garrett is the writer-in-residence at the Katherine Anne Porter House in Kyle, TX. His fiction and essays have appeared in Gargoyle, The Susquehanna Review, and phati’tude, among others, and his story “The Exhausted Pose” won an Esoteric Award in LGBT fiction from Carve Magazine. He is currently at work on a novel.

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

This month’s Novel Night authors are Tracey S. Phillips and Josephine Blacke.

Tracey S. Phillips will read from her debut thriller, Best Kept Secrets, and Josephine Blacke will read from her suspenseful second novel Tia.

When Fay Ramsey is found dead, Morgan Jewell’s entire world crumbles. Years later, Morgan, now a homicide detective, is still haunted by the abrupt end to her best friend’s life, but she has failed to put the crooked puzzle pieces together. Nothing makes sense. The leads have run dry. She requests access to the scene of a murder: a woman whose body is left mangled. It’s too similar to Fay’s to ignore. Now the old memories begin to surface. Fay held a secret in those final days. What got her killed? What was her secret?

Tracey S. Phillips is a serial artist. For the daughter of an artist and granddaughter of a pianist, playing music and creating art are a way of life. She entered college as a fashion model and musician. She married her best friend and became the mother of two grown children. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband and two dogs. Psychological thrillers are her love and female characters drive her stories. Best Kept Secrets is her debut novel released by Crooked Lane Books. The manuscript won a Hugh Holton award in 2018.

Josephine Blacke is an indie author and freelance writer living in Austin, Texas. Tia is her second novel. Her debut novel Mama’s Boy is available in paperback and e-book. Previous publications include Eat & Drink Austin, a local foodie magazine. Josephine is the proud mother of three adults, a cat named Princess Buttercup, and an old Rottweiler named Fat Hank.

Join us for something rather special: Austin Community College’s Creative Writing Department will be introducing us to the two winners of their 2018 Balcones Prize. Shena McAuliffe will read from The Good Echo (2018 Balcones Fiction Prize) and Margaree Little will read from her collection Rest (2018 Balcones Poetry Prize).

Shena McAuliffe’s debut novel, The Good Echo (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), won the Big Moose Prize and the Balcones Fiction Prize. Her essay collection, Glass, Light, Electricity, winner of the Permafrost Prize in nonfiction, is forthcoming from the University of Alaska Press in February 2020. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. She grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado, and now lives in Schenectady, New York, where she is an assistant professor of fiction at Union College.

Margaree Little is the author of REST (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the 2018 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2019 Audre Lorde Award. She holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her poems and criticism have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among other journals; her translations from the Russian have appeared in Asymptote and The Brooklyn Rail and are forthcoming in APR. Little is the recipient of fellowships and awards including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo/ France Fellowship, a Kenyon Review Fellowship, and an Ohio Individual Excellence Award. She lives in Tucson and teaches at Pima Community College.

Sponsored by the ACC Creative Writing  Department. This event is free and open to the public.

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 Claire Bowman, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Advantages of Being Evergreen by Oliver Baez Bendorf.

Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf’s remarkable Advantages of Being Evergreen is an essential book for our time and for all time… Baez Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. I am living for the world these poems anticipate… This is a book of the earth’s abiding wonder. And the body’s unbreakable ability to bloom. —Gabrielle Calvocoressi

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 in celebrating the launch of the 2020 winter issue of Kallisto Gaia Press’ literary journal, The Ocotillo Review, which features over 100 pages of literary genius by award-winning writers from around the world and superb new pieces by writers from underserved communities.

This event will also be celebrating the winner of the 2019 Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize.  John Blair is the 2019 winner for his poem, “The Shape of things To Come.” John and judge Natalia Treviño will be in attendance. Other featured readers include Wendy Goodman (Kingston, MD), Shelli Cornelison, Diana Conces, Ed O’Casey, Devin Guthrie, John Milkereit, Benjamin Nash, Margie McCreles Roe, Steve Wilson, and Sean Winn. Members of the Kallisto Gaia Press editorial staff and board of directors will be available for a Q&A after the event. Light fare will be served.