Malvern Books

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.

The South Austin Writers Workshop is a creative writing group of dedicated writers. Along with their current instructor, Shannon Perri, they meet monthly to read, write, and share their work amongst each other. Now, they’re excited to share some of their work with family, friends, and the local literary community. Join us for a reading of their wonderful writing!

Get your cones ready for another special edition of I Scream Social! Featuring women and non-binary writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month we have so much to celebrate, namely the launch of I Scream Social Anthology Vol. 2, a book showcasing writers from the past two years of the series! We’ll have copies to sell and tons of festivities planned for the evening.

Every single person that contributed to this anthology has graced our stage: edited by dream team Claire Bowman, Schandra Madha, and Annar Veröld, and with an introduction by mónica teresa ortiz and cover art by Tsz Kam!

Our 34 incredible contributors include: Kimberly Alidio, Sarah Renee Beach, Celia Bell, Maryan Nagy Captan, Claudia Delfina Cardona, Bev Chukwu, Elizabeth Clausen, Nicole Cortichiato, Maris Finn, Kendra Fortmeyer, Annelyse Gelman, Rachel Gray, Vivé Griffith, Meg E. Griffitts, Janalyn Guo, Jessica Hincapie, Vanessa Couto Johnson, Keona, KB, Taisia Kitaiskaia, Katherine Lamb, Kat Lewis, Meaghan Loraas, Aimée Mackovic, Lisa L. Moore, Desiree Morales, Aneesa Needel, Jourden V. Sander, Amanda Scott, Lily Someson, Citlalli Soto-Ferate, Itzel Soto-Ferate, Alana Torrez, and Kelsey Williams.

Stay tuned for our schedule for the evening!

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

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 King Alone by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Alyson Waters.

A King Alone is set in a remote Alpine village that is cut off from the world by rugged mountains and by long months when the ground is covered with snow and the heavens with cloud. One such winter, villagers begin mysteriously to disappear. Soon the village is paralyzed by terror, which gives way to relief and eager anticipation when the outsider Langlois arrives to investigate. What he discovers, however, will leave no one reassured, and his reappearance in the village a few years later, now assigned the task of guarding it from wolves, awakens those troubling memories. A man of few words, a regal manner, and military efficiency, Langlois baffles and fascinates the villagers, whose different responses to him shape Jean Giono’s increasingly charged narrative. This novel about a tiny community at the dangerous edge of things and a man of law who is a man alone could be described as a metaphysical Western. It unfolds with the uncanny inevitability and disturbing intensity of a dream.

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 Julie Howd’s chapbook, Threshold (Host Publications).

Host Publications is honored to award Julie Howd’s chapbook Threshold as the recipient of the Spring 2020 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.

Julie Howd is a poet from Massachusetts. Her first chapbook, Talking from the Knees Up, was published by dancing girl press in 2018. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received the 2015 Roy Crane Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Creative Arts. Her work can be found in Deluge, The Spectacle, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She lives in Amherst, MA.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Sarah Harris Wallman’s story collection Senseless Women, winner of the 2019 Juniper Prize for Fiction. With readings from Sarah and guests Ashleigh Pedersen and Jaime DeBlanc-Knowles.

Exploring the darker side of optimism, Sarah Harris Wallman’s debut collection shows women attempting to build durable havens from reality, struggling to keep relationships intact, and reinventing themselves. A lonely music teacher at a Nashville Christian academy awaits the miracle of love; a Jane Doe recalls the affair that sustained—and ended—her; a new mother brings life into the world during a bleak election party; young girls are exploited by a nightclub owner in death, as in life. Alone or in weird sisterhood, some of these women are senseless because they refuse to feel, others because they’ve been deprived of stimuli and attention. As these twelve stories prove, there’s no sensible way to fall in love, raise children, or escape (even dead girls have to go on stage and sing for their supper). This is Senseless Women.

Sarah Harris Wallman grew up in Nashville, TN, though she has also lived in Arkansas, New York City, and Glastonbury, UK (that’s where King Arthur was buried). She has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and currently teaches in the MFA program at Albertus Magnus college in New Haven, CT. Her stories have received awards from the Tucson Festival of Books and Prada.

Ashleigh Pedersen’s fiction has been featured in New Stories from the South, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Design Observer, The Silent History, A Strange Object, and the New York Public Library’s Library Simplified app. Her story “Small and Heavy World” was a finalist for both Best American Short Stories and a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, where she was the recipient of a full scholarship and teaching fellowship as well as the Turow-Kinder Award. She just completed her first novel and can occasionally be spotted in Austin theater and film projects.

Jaime deBlanc-Knowles holds an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published in Post Road and Meridian, and she has been the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Lighthouse Works Fellowship. She currently teaches creative writing workshops through UT Informal Classes, the Writing Barn, and Fresh Ink.

Jojn us for a reading with Lisa Rosenberg and Adrienne Drobnies. Lisa and Adrienne will be on a panel of scientist-poets at the upcoming AWP Conference in San Antonio.

Lisa Rosenberg’s debut title, A Different Physics, draws on her years as an engineer in the space program. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, she served as the 2017/2018 Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California, and has been awarded a 2020 Djerassi Residency for Scientist-Artists.

Adrienne Drobnies’ first book of poetry is Salt and Ashes (Signature Editions). She is an Austin native, who now lives in Vancouver, Canada, and she has been in residence at the Banff Centre. Her poetry won the 2017 Gwendolyn MacEwen Award and was a finalist for the CBC literary award. She has a PhD in chemistry.

Join us for a bilingual reading with Kim Yideum and Jiyoon Lee, author and translator respectively of the novel Blood Sisters.

Blood Sisters tells the story of Jeong Yeoul, a young Korean college student in the 1980s, when the memory of President Chun Doohwan’s violent suppression of student demonstrations against martial law was still fresh. Yideum captures with raw honesty the sense of dread felt by many Korean women during this time as Jeong struggles in a swirl of misguided desires and hopelessness against a society distorted by competing ideologies, sexual violence, and cultural conservatism. Facing this helplessness, her impulse is to escape into the world of art. Blood Sisters is a vivid, powerful portrayal of a woman’s efforts to live an authentic life in the face of injustice.

Join us for an evening with Bonnar Spring, who will be reading from her debut novel, Toward the Light.

Bonnar Spring writes eclectic and stylish thrillers with an international flavor. A nomad at heart, she hitchhiked across Europe at sixteen and joined the Peace Corps after college. She lives in a tiny house on a New Hampshire salt marsh.

Join us for a reading with Arielle Greenberg, E.C. Belli, Julia Guez, LiAundra Grace, and Julie Kantor. We’ll be celebrating the recent release of Arielle Greenberg’s I Live in the Country & other dirty poems.

Arielle Greenberg’s I Live in the Country & other dirty poems exploits and undoes the stereotype of the “wholesome country life.” Here, the speaker moves to the country (“where the animals are”) in order to live a whole life, one in which she can live honestly and openly in a non-monogamous marriage. Her book is a visceral, erotic celebration of the cornucopia of sexual pleasures to be had in that rural life—in the muck of a pasture in spring or behind the bins of whole-wheat pastry flour at the local Co-op. Greenberg hauls out what has previously been stored under dark counters and labeled deviant—kink, fetish, and bondage—and moves it into the sunshine of sex-positivity and mutual consent. In doing so, she forges new literary territory—a feminist re-visioning of the Romantic pastoral poems of seduction. “I am trying to turn my eye toward joy,” she writes. “My heart toward bliss.”

Arielle Greenberg’s previous poetry collections are Come Along with Me to the Pasture Now, Slice, My Kafka Century and Given. She’s also the writer of the creative nonfiction book Locally Made Panties, the transgenre chapbooks Shake Her and Fa(r)ther Down, and co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic. She has co-edited three anthologies, including Gurlesque, forthcoming in an expanded digital edition co-edited with Becca Klaver. Arielle’s poems and essays have been featured in Best American Poetry, Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers and The Racial Imaginary, among other anthologies. She wrote a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review, and edited a series of essays called (K)ink: Writing While Deviant for The Rumpus. A former tenured professor in poetry at Columbia College Chicago, she lives with her family in Maine, where she writes, edits, teaches and works for a creative services agency.

E.C. Belli is the author of Objects of Hunger (SIU Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Verse, AGNI, and FIELD, among others. She is the translator of I, Little Asylum by Emmanuelle Guattari (Semiotext(e), 2014) and The Nothing Bird : Selected Poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd (Oberlin College Press, 2013).

Julia Guez is a poet, writer and translator. Her first collection of poetry, In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame, came out this fall from Four Way Books. For the last decade, Guez has been working with Teach For America. She also teaches creative writing at Rutgers. Guez lives in Brooklyn. (Photo credit: Wesley Mann.)

LiAundra Grace believes poetry is the gateway for those who have yet to find a connection to written words. Her work has been published in the 2014 Cave Canem Anthology, in Toe Good Poetry’s online journal, and in the 2008 Inprint Houston Poetry Compilation. Currently, Grace is working on her first collection of poems as well as her first children’s book, while teaching at Lone Star College. Grace received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is a Cave Canem Fellow. She currently resides in Katy, Texas with her husband and two children.

Julie Kantor is an artist/scholar living in Austin, TX. Her chapbook, LAND, was published by Dikembe Press in 2015. Her poetry has appeared in the I Scream Social Anthology, Boston Review, Public Space, Los Angeles Quarterly Review of Books, elsewhere, and has been translated into Ukrainian. She is on the board of directors for Cuneiform Press. She is a PhD candidate in American Studies at University of Texas Austin, finishing her dissertation on reality television and political experience.

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 Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban.

In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research…

Reviewers have compared Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter—how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm.

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, March 8th.

Join us for an afternoon with poets David Cavanagh, Sharon Webster, and Steven Ray Smith. We’ll be celebrating the launch of David’s new poetry collection, The Somnambulist and The Good Life.

David Cavanagh’s fifth book of poems, The Somnambulist and The Good Life, has just come out from Salmon Poetry of Ireland. His previous collections include Straddle, Falling Body, and The Middleman, all three from Salmon Poetry; and Cycling in Plato’s Cave from Fomite Press. He lives in Burlington, Vermont.

Sharon Webster is an interdisciplinary artist who works in any material she can get her hands on—including language—to create fresh renditions of vision and voice. Drawn to the intimate and the sensual, she is a frequent art exhibitor and was one of eight to recently represent Vermont in the Boston group show, Threaded: Contemporary Fiber Art in New England.
Sharon is also ensconced in the colorfully diverse work of helping developmentally challenged adults live normal lives, and has done so since the ’80s. Her book, Everyone Lives Here, is on sale today.

Steven Ray Smith’s poetry has been published in The Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Kenyon Review, Slice, Barrow Street, THINK, Tar River Poetry, Poet Lore and others. New work is forthcoming in The Hollins Critic. He lives in Austin.

Join us for a reading with Jenny Molberg, Roger Reeves, and Kathryn Nuernberger (left to right, below).

Refusal, Jenny Molberg’s second collection of poetry, draws on elements of the uncanny—invented hospitals, the Demogorgon of Dungeons and Dragons, an Ophelia character who refuses suicide—to investigate trauma, addiction, and patriarchal forces of oppression. A sequence of epistolary poems looks to friendship as a safe haven from violent romantic relationships, and a series of poems that address a mother’s struggle with addiction looks at the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship affected by alcoholism. Refusal seeks to break silences in the wake of the #metoo movement, and to interrogate a cultural misogyny that weighs on a woman’s position in the world.

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the 2014 Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017) and Refusal (forthcoming, LSU Press). She is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment and her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Missouri Review, Poetry International, Indiana Review, Boulevard, and other publications. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and edits Pleiades magazine.

Roger Reeves is the author of the poetry collection King Me (Copper Canyon) and recipient of honors and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House. Kim Addonizio selected “Kletic of Walt Whitman” for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He earned his MFA from the Michener Center in 2010 and his PhD in English from UT’s Dept of English, and he previously taught at University of Illinois/Chicago.

Kathryn Nuernberger’s Rue is a book of about prairies. A book about rural America. A book about the science and folklore surrounding plants historically used for birth control. It is a book about an affair, a breakdown, and also it is about love. Rue is a book about everything that might be possible between us once we have decided to tell the truth of our lives. Poems from this collection have appeared widely in journals including 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Field, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry International, West Branch, Willow Springs, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two previous poetry collections, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. She has also written a collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, H. J. Andrews Research Forest, American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.

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 Tommy Mouton.

Tommy Mouton is a Southern writer and a writing coach. A former John Steinbeck Fellow (2013-2014), his work appears in Auburn Avenue, Reed, and Callaloo. A dynamic dramatic reader, his work has been featured in venues hosted by KKUP 91.5 “Out of Our Minds” Poetry Radio, Sacramento Stories on Stage, LitQuake, Center for Literary Arts, Poetry Center San José, and a host of others. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, raised in the unincorporated community of Moss Bluff (the principal setting of his memoir-in-progress and the inspiration for much of this work), Tommy recently, as of July 2018, relocated to Austin from San José, CA—with his wife and three children. He currently teaches creative writing and composition at Huston-Tillotson University. This is his first Austin reading invitation.

Join us for a reading from Timothy Donnelly, whose third poetry collection, The Problem of the Many, was recently published by Wave Books. Timothy will be joined by Leanna Petronella and Logan Fry.

Timothy Donnelly’s most recent books are The Problem of the Many and the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award-winning The Cloud Corporation, both published by Wave Books. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches poetry at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Leanna Petronella’s debut poetry collection, The Imaginary Age, won the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, CutBank, Quarterly West, ElevenEleven, and other publications. Her fiction appears in Drunken Boat, and her nonfiction appears in Brevity. 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. (Photo credit: Kelly Zhu.)

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.

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 Judi Taylor Cantor and Marc Hess.

Judi Taylor Cantor will be reading from Rich White Trash, the saga of an enormous―and sometimes crazy―Catholic family living in Austin, Texas. Marc Hess will read from Gillespie County Fair.

Rich White Trash gives you mystery, love, death, and a heapin’ cup full of Texas. Land, oil, cattle, drugs, sex, religion, rebellion, gun running, politics, and patriotism collide with dreams and dysfunction in this wild, quarter-century ride. The Landry family’s 700-acre ranch in the hill country outside Austin was a goldmine the family could always rely on, and patriarch VF Landry believed it would keep his eight children tethered to their roots. But between verbal and physical abuse at the hands of their beautiful mother, their father’s obsession with Texas politics, and their own occasional knock-down, blowout fights, the eight Landry kids were determined to live life on their own terms―even if that meant trouble. In this sprawling chronicle, secrets are revealed. Apocryphal treasures are found. Fortunes are made and taken away. And in the end, the land wins.

Author Judi Taylor Cantor is a native of Austin, Texas (she grew up in Travis Heights), and a 1976 cum laude graduate of the University of Texas in Austin. With a background in journalism and copy writing, she is currently the Director of Planned Giving for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. Judi works with donors to shape their legacy, and writes newsletters, brochures, and ads for Harvard Public Health magazine, as well as articles for professional journals. Parents to three grown sons and grandparents to 11 grandchildren, she and her husband live in Massachusetts. She misses Texas sunsets and the tympanic sound of rain on a dusty road. Rich White Trash is her first novel.

The Gillespie County Fair, the oldest fair in Texas, looms insistently over the shoulder of Marc Hess’s new novel. As rampant land development and tourist money begin to transform the old German farming community of Fredericksburg, two intermarried pioneer families lock in a life-and-death struggle over the sale of their homestead. Their vicious feud in an otherwise harmonious and bucolic community leads to the demise of two pioneer families and culminates in the triumph of one hard-headed young girl. This book delves into the clash of new wealth and ingrained poverty as rural Texas grapples with a changing world. In a short period of time, the town of Fredericksburg has morphed from a rock-rimmed farming community into the chic tourist destination that it is today. While the town itself has blossomed, this is the story about a family that destroys itself.

Marc Hess has lived in Fredericksburg long enough to see this rock-rimmed German farming community morph into the chic tourist destination that it is today. Steeped in a career of magazine publishing and travel writing, Marc has served on the Board of Directors of the Writers’ League of Texas.

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.

*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com. The book can be purchased via our online store here. ***

This month’s title is Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin.

Victor Pelevin’s novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: “full of the ridiculous and the sublime,” says The Observer. Omon is chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program, the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. However, he enrolls only to encounter the terrifying absurdity of Soviet protocol and its backward technology: a bicycle-powered moonwalker; the outrageous Colonel Urgachin (“a kind of Soviet Dr. Strangelove”—New York Times); and a one-way assignment to the moon. The New Yorker proclaimed: “Omon’s adventure is like a rocket firing off its various stages — each incident is more jolting and propulsively absurd than the one before.”

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.

*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will most likely take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com. ***

This month’s selection is The Alternation, Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history. This book can be purchased online via our BookShop site: https://bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590176177.

In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice.

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.

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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.

This month’s title is All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman.

“One of the saddest, funniest, strangest, and most romantic books. . . . Brilliant!” —The Bookseller

“All Tom’s friends really are superheroes. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, Perf is hypnotized by her ex-boyfriend, Hypno, to believe Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, the Perfectionist is sure Tom has abandoned her, so she’s moving away. With no idea Tom’s beside her, she boards a plane. Tom has until they land to make her see him…”

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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.

This month’s title is Whale and Vapor by Kim Kyung Ju.

The poems in Whale and Vapor emphasize exhaustion—physically, mentally, and as an existential condition. Kim Kyung Ju playfully turns toward the lyric in this work as a way to reconcile himself with the contemporary world by engaging in dialogue with his Korean literary ancestry. Masterfully translated by Jake Levine in close conversation with the author, this collection by one of the most popular and critically acclaimed poets to come out in South Korea in the new millennium explores the cold tunnels of today’s tired, dark times.

The I Scream Social you know and love, but virtual! This month, we’re so honored to feature nicole v basta, Cindy Huyser, and Neysa King!

A little bit about I Scream Social: we’ve been around since June 2015, featuring women and nonbinary writers and slinging free ice cream in the Austin, TX area. We have two anthologies linked at the bottom of this event page—the most recent, published last month and featuring the work of 34 women and nonbinary writers!

Using Zoom, we’ll be able to host a virtual I Scream Social reading, where the structure and community guidelines will be the same. New things include: new open mic sign-up process, pajamas are totally acceptable, and bring your own ice cream, duh! We’ll be posting the meeting ID and password Friday morning on Facebook.

7:05 pm :: We’ll kick off I Scream Social with a tiny hello from your loving hosts—Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha!

7:15pm :: Then we’ll dive into our open mic! [open mic sign-up will be limited to 8 folks and sign up information will be posted on Facebook and on our Instagram]

7:45pm :: featured readers nicole v basta, Cindy Huyser, and Neysa King!

Things to note about the Zoom reading: all guests will be muted, except for Hosts and readers when they are designated to read/perform.

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️FEATURED READER BIOS〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰

〰️ nicole v basta’s chapbook V was chosen by Rigoberto González as the winner of The New School’s Annual Contest. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Birdfeast, Tinderbox, The Shallow Ends, Ninth Letter, Nat. Brut etc. nicole is also a maker of collages, a teaching artist, an Assistant Poetry Editor at Anomaly, and a three time artist-in-residence at Art Farm Nebraska. She grew up in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania and had her second upbringing in Ithaca and Brooklyn, New York. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla peanut butter!

〰️ “P” is for passion, power plants and programming, pedaling along paths, photography and poetry. All 26 letters of the alphabet are a glorious playground, and Cindy loves playing there. Cindy Huyser’s favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip!

〰️ Neysa King is a poet, essayist and creator of the online community Dissertation to Dirt, essays about young farmers and the local food economy. Her essays and poetry have been published in the Huffington Post, Slippery Elm Literary Journal, Chaleur Magazine, the San Antonio Review and others. She is the recipient of the San Antonio Writers Guild Prize in Poetry and the 2019 Princemere Prize in Poetry. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip!

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️OUR ANTHOLOGIES〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Shop the bundle [Volume 1 & 2 and a handmade pin by Tsz Kam]
Volume 1
Volume 2

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.

*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will most likely take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***

This month’s selection is Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships. Please note: we’ll discuss parts 1 and 2 in June (approx. 240 pages) and parts 3 and 4 in July (approx. 250 pages). This book can be purchased online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590173466.

Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships resurrects the fantastic world of the tenth century AD when the Vikings roamed and rampaged from the northern fastnesses of Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean. Bengtsson’s hero, Red Orm—canny, courageous, and above all lucky—is only a boy when he is abducted from his Danish home by the Vikings and made to take his place at the oars of their dragon-prowed ships. Orm is then captured by the Moors in Spain, where he is initiated into the pleasures of the senses and fights for the Caliph of Cordova. Escaping from captivity, Orm washes up in Ireland, where he marvels at those epicene creatures, the Christian monks, and from which he then moves on to play an ever more important part in the intrigues of the various Scandinavian kings and clans and dependencies . . . Packed with pitched battles and blood feuds and told throughout with wit and high spirits, Bengtsson’s book is a splendid adventure that features one of the most unexpectedly winning heroes in modern fiction.

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.

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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.

This month’s title is César Aira’s Dinner, described as “a literary zombie tale”:

One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother dine with a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors. They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old windup toys and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to watch some late night TV before retiring. The news quickly takes a turn for the worse as, horrified, the newscaster finds herself reporting about the dead rising from their graves, leaving the cemetery, and sucking the blood of the living—all somehow, disturbingly reminiscent of the dinner party.

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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.

This month’s title is A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton.

Alfred Starr Hamilton ‘wrote to the governor of poetry / And simply signed [his] own name.’ Consider this collection assembled by two very dedicated allographers an essential expansion on said letter. People who’ve encountered Hamilton’s work previously will be glad for the chance to see familiar poems alongside many marvelous new ones. And how I envy first-time readers of this most generous and genuine American writer. —Graham Foust 

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.

*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will most likely take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***

This month’s selection is parts 3 and 4 of Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships (we discussed parts 1 and 2 in June). This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590173466.

Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships resurrects the fantastic world of the tenth century AD when the Vikings roamed and rampaged from the northern fastnesses of Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean. Bengtsson’s hero, Red Orm—canny, courageous, and above all lucky—is only a boy when he is abducted from his Danish home by the Vikings and made to take his place at the oars of their dragon-prowed ships. Orm is then captured by the Moors in Spain, where he is initiated into the pleasures of the senses and fights for the Caliph of Cordova. Escaping from captivity, Orm washes up in Ireland, where he marvels at those epicene creatures, the Christian monks, and from which he then moves on to play an ever more important part in the intrigues of the various Scandinavian kings and clans and dependencies . . . Packed with pitched battles and blood feuds and told throughout with wit and high spirits, Bengtsson’s book is a splendid adventure that features one of the most unexpectedly winning heroes in modern fiction.

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.

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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.

This month’s title is Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, which Zadie Smith called “an idiosyncratic and fascinating novel.”

Hawthorn and his partner, Child, are called to the scene of a mysterious shooting in North London. The only witness is unreliable, the clues are scarce, and the victim, a young man who lives nearby, swears he was shot by a ghost car. While Hawthorn battles with fatigue and strange dreams, the crime and the narrative slip from his grasp and the stories of other Londoners take over: a young pickpocket on the run from his boss; an editor in possession of a disturbing manuscript; a teenage girl who spends her days at the Tate Modern; and a madman who has been infected by former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Haunting these disparate lives is the shadowy figure of Mishazzo, an elusive crime magnate who may be running the city, or may not exist at all.

* * *

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Malvern Books is proud to present an evening (via Zoom; details to come) with Cotton Mather guitarist and prize-winning poet Harold Whit Williams, who will be reading from his new book and performing songs from his new solo album, both titled My Heavens.

Worth noting: All royalties from the download or stream of My Heavens goes to Color of Change.

Williams returns to form on this, his fifth poetry collection. The very idea of a paradise—beyond sky or upon earth or within each moment—is poked and prodded with both sharp cynicism and wide-eyed wonder alike. Addressing grief, the day in/day out depictions are deeply distilled, the lines sober yet also playful, loose and languid. Nostalgia without sentimentality. Dreamlike visions without surrealism. These poems settle down across the kitchen table from a reader for a little give and take, a little what’s it all about? “The transubstantiation, the utter mystery,” Williams writes, “I swallow it all/And expect nothing in return.”

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

Click here to join.

Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597

One tap mobile:
+13462487799,,2829783950#,,,,0#,,788597# US (Houston)

Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbigMUsjuS

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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us regarding curbside pick up.

On Saturday, July 25th at 1pm we’ll be discussing A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib.

Hanif Abdurraqib is donating 100% of the 2020 royalties from this book to theokraproject.com, a collective that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people by bringing home-cooked, healthy, and culturally specific meals and resources to Black Trans People.

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It’s a book about a mother’s death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author’s black friends wanted to listen to ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’ It’s about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor’s dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

Click here to join.

Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597

One tap mobile:
+13462487799,,2829783950#,,,,0#,,788597# US (Houston)

Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbigMUsjuS

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.

*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will most likely take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***

This month’s selection is The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart, translated from the French by Barbara Bray. This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590176801.

This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the adversities of a peasant community, the ecstasies of love, and domestic realities while arriving at her own precious happiness. In the words of Toussine, the wise, tender grandmother who raises her, “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.” A masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond relates the triumph of a generous and hopeful spirit, while offering a gorgeously lush, imaginative depiction of the flora, landscape, and customs of Gua­deloupe. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.

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.

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Join us in celebrating the launch of David Meischen’s Anyone’s Son: Poems. (This event will take place via Zoom; details to come.)

From the rural South Texas of the nineteen fifties to a desert mesa in New Mexico many years later, Anyone’s Son illuminates the moments of a life animated by the author’s yearning, at its root sexual, for the company of another man. In five sections, each one corresponding to a stage in the life delineated here, the author offers scenes from his childhood on a small farm, as well as moments of conflicted adolescence. He explores unmitigated sexual pleasure, sometimes fraught with anguish and shame. He remembers scenes from marriage and fatherhood, from the wreckage and rebuilding that came at midlife. And finally, glimpses from a second marriage, this time unconflicted, to a man, to the right man. At its heart, Anyone’s Son poses an implicit question: What is identity?

David Meischen has been honored by a Pushcart Prize for “How to Shoot at Someone Who Outdrew You,” a chapter of his memoir, originally published in The Gettysburg Review and available in Pushcart Prize XLII. With three decades of poetry publication credits, David is dedicated to the narrative form. In the summer of 2020, Storylandia, Issue 34, will be entirely his work—The Distance Between Here and Elsewhere: Three Stories. Recipient of the 2017 Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters, David has fiction, nonfiction, or poetry in The Common, Copper Nickel, The Evansville Review, Salamander, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and elsewhere. He has served as a juror for the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and in the fall of 2018, he completed a writing residency at Jentel Arts. Co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press, David lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.

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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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.

This month’s title is NVK by Temple Drake.

Set in the otherworldly megalopolis that is today’s Shanghai, Temple Drake’s suspenseful first novel blends the gothic, the erotic, and the supernatural as it charts an intense and dangerous affair. Written in spare, high-octane prose, NVK is the first in a series of dark, hypnotic novels that explore the roots of desire and the cruel costs of immortality.

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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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us regarding curbside pick up.

On Saturday, August 22nd at 1pm we’ll be discussing A Treatise on Stars by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.

A Treatise on Stars extends Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

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Join us for a night of poetry and conversation with two leading lights in the poetic new guard, Jabari Asim and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. Asim has long engaged conversations and issues regarding race in America; his book of essays We Can’t Breathe: Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. He will be reading from his debut collection of poetry Stop and Frisk: American Poems and will be in conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, former Poet Laureate of Houston, an arts activist and educator. She will be reading from her collection, Newsworthy: Poems. It is sure to be a dynamic event with provocative and defiant poetry as well as insightful conversation about what it means to be POC in 2020’s America. This event will take place via Zoom; details below.

Jabari Asim is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts and the author of seven books for adults—including We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival—and ten books for children. His poems are included in several anthologies, including Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present; Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century; and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. After more than a decade at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Washington Post, he now directs the MFA program at Emerson College.

Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-recognized performance poet and the first African-American Poet Laureate of Houston. Formerly ranked #2 Female Performance Poet in the World, she is executive director of VIP Arts, a non-profit dedicated to promoting literacy and the arts in underserved populations. Her genre-bending poetry has engendered unconventional collaborations with groups as disparate as the Rockets and the Houston Ballet. Her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and the TEDx circuit. An opera for which she wrote the libretto premieres at the Houston Grand Opera in the spring of 2020.

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Join us in celebrating the launch of Donna Dechen Birdwell’s Song Of All Songs (Earthcycles, Book One). Donna will be in conversation with Patrice Sarath. This event will take place via Zoom; details below.

Song of All Songs: Earthcycles, Book One

Long after the apocalypse, Earth has repeopled itself. Twice.

Despised by her mother’s people and demeaned by her absent father’s legacy, Meridia has one friend—Damon, an eccentric photologist. When Damon shows Meridia a stone he discovered in an old photo bag purchased from a vagrant peddler, she is transfixed. There’s a woman, she says, a dancing woman. And a song. Can a song contain worlds? Oblivious of mounting political turmoil, the two set out to find the old peddler, to find out what he knows about the stone, the woman, and the song. But marauding zealots attack and take Damon captive. Meridia is alone. Desolate. Terrified. Yet determined to carry on, to pursue the stone’s extraordinary song, even as it lures her into a journey that will transform her world.

Donna Dechen Birdwell is an anthropologist whose curiosity about what makes human beings tick propelled her to travel widely, listening to the stories of many different cultures and eventually coming up with a few of her own. The novels in her near-future Recall Chronicles include Way of the Serpent, Shadow of the Hare, and Flight of the Owl. She is also the author of Not Knowing, a novel of contemporary fiction. Donna is an artist and photographer as well as a novelist. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Southern Methodist University and previously taught at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. She now writes, paints, and photographs in Austin.

Patrice Sarath is an author and editor living in Austin, Texas. Her novels include the fantasy books The Sisters Mederos and Fog Season (Books I and II of the Tales of Port Saint Frey), the series Books of the Gordath (Gordath Wood, Red Gold Bridge, and The Crow God’s Girl) and the romance The Unexpected Miss Bennet. Patrice’s numerous short stories have appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including Weird Tales, Black Gate, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, and many others. Her short story “A Prayer for Captain La Hire” was included in Year’s Best Fantasy of 2003 compiled by David Hartwell and Katherine Cramer. Her story “Pigs and Feaches,” originally published in Apex Digest, was reprinted in 2013 in Best Tales of the Apocalypse by Permuted Press.

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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Ute Carson’s Gypsy Spirit, a lifelong collection of published short stories, flash stories, essays, commentaries, and memoir.

Gypsy Spirit is an extraordinary mix of memoir, history, photography, and poetry—I have never seen anything like it. The book revolves around family, living and dead, rendered in rich and sensuous detail. We meet Carson’s German grandparents and parents who are living, dying, and suffering during and after World War II. We meet her husband, children and grandchildren as they are growing up and thriving in contemporary Texas. It is hard to describe the richness, passion, history, suffering and love in Gypsy Spirit. Readers will have to discover for themselves.
—Thomas R. Cole, author of No Color is My Kind

A writer from youth and an M.A. graduate in comparative literature from the University of Rochester, German-born Ute Carson published her first prose piece in 1977. Colt Tailing, a 2004 novel, was a finalist for the Peter Taylor Book Award. Carson’s story “The Fall” won Outrider Press’s Grand Prize and appeared in its short story and poetry anthology A Walk through My Garden, 2007. Her second novel In Transit was published in 2008. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines in the US and abroad. Carson’s poetry was featured on the televised Spoken Word Showcase 2009, 2010, 2011, Channel Austin. A poetry collection Just a Few Feathers was published in 2011. The poem “A Tangled Nest of Moments” placed second in the Eleventh International Poetry Competition 2012. Her chapbook Folding Washing was published in 2013 and her collection of poems My Gift to Life was nominated for the 2015 Pushcart Award Prize. Save the Last Kiss, a novella, was published in 2016. Her poetry collection Reflections was out in 2018. She received the Ovidiu-Bektore Literary Award 2018 from the Anticus Mulicultural Association in Constanta, Romania. In 2018 she was nominated a second time for the Pushcart Award Prize by the PlainView Press. Gypsy Spirit was published in 2020.

Ute Carson resides in Austin, Texas with her husband. They have three daughters, six grandchildren, a horse and a clowder of cats.

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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.

*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***

This month’s selection is Free Day by Inès Cagnati, translated by Liesl Schillinger. This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781681373584.

In the marshy countryside of southwestern France, fourteen-year-old Galla rides her battered bicycle twenty miles, twice a month, from the high school she attends on scholarship back to her family’s rocky, barren farm. Galla’s loving, overwhelmed mother would prefer she stay at home, where Galla can look after her neglected little sisters and defuse her father’s brutal rages. What does this dutiful daughter owe her family, and what does she owe her own ambition? In Inès Cagnati’s haunting and visually powerful novel Free Day, winner of the 1973 Prix Roger Nimier, Galla makes an extra journey one frigid winter Saturday to surprise her mother. As she anticipates their reunion, she mentally retraces the crooked path of her family’s past and the more recent map of her school life as a poor but proud student. Galla’s dense interior monologue blends with the landscape around her, building a powerful portrait of a girl who yearns to liberate herself from the circumstances that confine her, without losing their ties to her heart.

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.

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The Lion & the Pirate set off on their next online adventure, hope you’ll be aboard!

We’ll start with two featured readers (TBA), and then it will be your time to shine. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: we’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. As we found last time, Rev isn’t great for music, so we’ll screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e (and let us know if you have questions).

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Join us in celebrating the launch of the summer 2020 issue of Kallisto Gaia Press’ literary journal, The Ocotillo Review. This event will take place via Zoom and feature the winner of their debut chapbook contest, Gary V. Powell (below), reading from his winning collection, Super Blood Wolf Moon. The event will also include readings by over thirty poets and writers from The Ocotillo Review.

We will have copies of the journal available at the store; call us at 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up. 

The Ocotillo Review features over 100 pages of literary genius by award-winning writers from around the world and superb new pieces by writers from underserved communities.

Gary V. Powell’s fiction can be read in many literary journals including the Thomas Wolfe Review, Carvezine, Fiction Southeast, Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Best New Writing 2015, and Pisgah Review. His first novel, Lucky Bastard, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing (2012). Two collections of previously-published short stories, Beyond Redemption and Getting Even and Other Stories, were released in 2015 and 2019, respectively. His poetry has appeared at One Minute Magazine and Live Nude Poems.

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Everyone is warmly invited to join us for the inaugural gathering of our brand-new book club, Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly, informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers (and with a bit of luck the authors themselves might sometimes be able to join us too!)

For our first meeting, we’ll be discussing Scott Semegran’s Sammie & Budgie, a quirky, mystical tale of a self-doubting IT nerd and his young son, who possesses the gift of foresight.

The novel’s delights abound… Semegran is a gifted writer, with a wry sense of humor. Poignant, yet never maudlin, this novel will appeal to literary-minded readers and fans of magical realism. —BlueInk Review, starred review

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

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Join us in celebrating the launch of Ross Wilcox’s debut short story collection, Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society: Stories. Ross will be joined by Josh Denslow, author of Not Everyone Is Special, and their publisher, Leland Cheuk, founder of 7.13 Books.

This event will take place via Zoom—details below. Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society: Stories can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

A battle of wills emerges when one of the suicide survivors in the Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society turns the meetings into a yoga class. A small town is gripped by a lawn ornamentation craze. A woman dresses up as Paul Bunyan to rob banks to pay her ailing mother’s exorbitant nursing home bills. A married couple decides to 3-D print a son… and his entire childhood. Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society is a funny and poignant story collection about everyday people confronting everyday challenges with escalating absurdity. Reminiscent of the work of Aimee Bender, Ross Wilcox’s stories will make you view the mundane in an entirely new way.

Ross Wilcox is from Elk Point, South Dakota. He teaches at the University of North Texas. His stories have appeared in numerous literary journals. He lives in Fort Worth with his wife and two elderly cats (17 and 13!). Currently, he’s at work on a novel.

Josh Denslow is the author of the collection Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books). Recent stories have appeared in Catapult, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Hobart, and Pithead Chapel. In addition to exploring dungeons in the Legend of Zelda with his three boys, he plays the drums in the band Borrisokane.

A MacDowell and Hawthornden Castle Fellow, Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books, most recently the novel NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in NPR, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon. He founded the indie press 7.13 Books.

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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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.

This month’s title is Everything Under by Daisy Johnson.

In this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth, Daisy Johnson explores questions of fate and free will, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships. Everything Under—a debut novel whose surreal, watery landscape will resonate with fans of Fen—is a daring, moving story that will leave you unsettled and unstrung.

“It takes a bold mind to steer so many elements through one tale, and an even stronger stylist to render them in a narrative that heeds, but seems not to, the laws of nature. Johnson has done all this in a book that will probably be read, like Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, for years to come as a part of the reclaiming of narrative territory.” —The Boston Globe

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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 meeting will take place via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us regarding curbside pick up. (The copies we have at the store are hardcover and we are offering a 20% discount on them.)

On Saturday, September 26th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Dunce by Mary Ruefle.

“These poems grace the readers with wonder, wisdom, and whim . . . securing Ruefle’s reputation among poets as the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

In Dunce Mary Ruefle returns to the poetic practice that has always been at her core. With her startlingly fresh sensibility, she enraptures us in poem after poem by the intensity of her attention, with the imaginative flourishes of her being-in-the-world, always deep with mysteries, unexpected appearances, and abiding yearning.

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Join us in celebrating the recent release of Liliana Valenzuela’s Codex of Love: Bendita ternura. Liliana will be joined by poets jo reyes-boitel and Edward Vidaurre.

This event will take place via Zoom; please see details below. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

Codex of Love: Bendita ternura is a migration of spirit. Liliana Valenzuela takes us by the hand and shows us where she comes from, where she’s been, and where she is through a collection that at times reads like a song and other times like a prayer. Valenzuela’s voice whispers to us and gives us pleasure. She is kind in her sensuality and transcendent in matters of the heart. The five sections in the collection are as visual as they are thought-provoking, through a metaphorical journey that’s tender and urgent. A well thought and well written poetic entrée for the starving reader.

jo reyes-boitel is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Somehow born in Minnesota, her family calls Texas, Florida, Mexico, and Cuba home. jo’s most recent work is “she wears bells,” a hybrid operetta rooted in the story of Coyolxauhqui, which imagines her after her dismemberment and exile on the moon. The piece combines music, spoken word, voice, and choreography. It will be performed in October by theater students at Palo Alto Community College in San Antonio, TX. jo’s first book, Michael + Josephine, was published by FlowerSong Press in 2019. jo is now at work on their second book and a chapbook and maybe a novella.

Edward Vidaurre is the author of seven collections of poetry. He is the 2018-2019 City of McAllen, Texas Poet Laureate, a four-time Pushcart-nominated poet, and publisher of FlowerSong Press. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, The Texas Observer, Grist, Poet Lore, The Acentos Review, Poetrybay, Voices de la Luna, as well as other journals and anthologies. Vidaurre is from Boyle Heights, California and now resides in McAllen, Texas with his wife and daughter.

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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.

*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***

This month’s selection is Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner. This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590173169.

Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes…

Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.

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.

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Join us in celebrating the launch of Scott Semegran’s eighth book, The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island. With readings from Scott and special guest Charlotte Gullick. This event will take place via Zoom; please see details below.

The summer of 1986. Central Texas. William and his friends should be having a blast. Instead, they are hounded by the Thousand Oaks Gang and their merciless leader, Bloody Billy. William found Billy’s backpack. And because of what it contains, Billy desperately wants it back, and he’ll do anything to get it. William hatches a plan for his friends to sneak away and hide in an abandoned lake house, except they become stranded on the lake’s desolate island without food or water. Will their time on the island devolve into chaos? Will the friends survive and be rescued?

The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island is Lord of the Flies meets The Body by Stephen King, the inspiration for the classic movie Stand By Me.

A gripping suspense story with adventure and danger, tinged with humorous banter between the four friends, the middle schoolers face certain death without adults to protect them from the unrelenting natural elements, as well as the wild creatures that lurk in the wilderness around the lake. With a backpack filled with money and marijuana they stole from the merciless gang leader, it’s only a matter of time before the high schoolers come looking for them, too.

From award-winning writer Scott Semegran, The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island is Semegran’s response to William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, which was Golding’s response to The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, an adventure novel from 1858. All three novels tackle the premise of boys stranded on an island, with Semegran’s novel taking a decidedly modern view of a group of friends in Central Texas during the summer of 1986 working to survive in a situation filled with danger and desperation with only each other to rely on.

Scott Semegran is an award-winning writer of eight books. BlueInk Review described him best as “a gifted writer, with a wry sense of humor.” His previous novel, To Squeeze a Prairie Dog: An American Novel, was the 2019 Readers’ Favorite International Book Award Winner: Silver Medal for Fiction – Humor/Comedy, the 2019 Texas Author Project Winner for Adult Fiction, and the 2020 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Gold Medal Winner for Humor. His book Sammie & Budgie was the first place winner for Fiction in the 2018 Texas Authors Book Awards. His book BOYS was the 2018 IndieReader Discovery Awards winner for Short Stories. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, four kids, two cats, and a dog. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in English.

Charlotte Gullick is the Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College, and she holds a MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis and a MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her first novel, By Way of Water, was chosen by Jayne Anne Phillips as Grand Prize Winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project. Her other awards include a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry and a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship in Fiction a MacDowell Colony Residency, a Ragdale Residency, as well as the Evergreen State College 2012 Teacher Excellence Award. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Brevity, Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus,and the LA Review.

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The Lion & the Pirate set off on their next online adventure, hope you’ll be aboard!

We’ll start with featured reader and L&P regular, Edith Tapia “Blackbird”!

About: Edith was born in her beloved country Mexico. She started to participate in local events since elementary school, like “Civil Mondays,” writing patriotic and traditional poems to perform for government members. In middle school, Edith competed in a statewide poetry contest, winning second place. In high school, she won second place in a nationwide poetry contest. The Sonora University awarded her an honorable mention for her participation in their literary regional contest with the piece “Plegarias de Una Luna Enamorada,” and Edith was published in their anthology, Realidad Aleatoria.

Now living in the USA, Edith attends open mics sharing her bilingual work. She has been featured twice for the “Austin Poetry Society” monthly event in 2018 and also published in their anthology in 2020. She has won the Ekphrastic challenge in the “Hearsay Poetry” open mic three times and been published on hearsaypoetry.com

Read Edith’s poems at https://medium.com/@blackbird.ville and https://www.wattpad.com/user/EBlackbird.

Then it will be your time to shine. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: we’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so we’ll screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e (and let us know if you have questions).

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ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event.

Join us in celebrating the Austin launch of Catherine A. Hamilton’s debut novel, Victoria’s War. This novel gives voice to the courageous Polish women who were kidnapped into real-life Nazi slave labor operations during WWII. Inspired by true stories, this lost chapter of history won’t soon be forgotten again.

This event will take place via Zoom; details below. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

POLAND, 1939: Nineteen-year-old Victoria Darski is eager to move away to college: her bags are packed and her train ticket is in hand. But instead of boarding a train to the University of Warsaw, she finds her world turned upside down when World War II breaks out. Victoria’s father is sent to a raging battlefront, and the Darski women must face the cruelty of the invaders without him. When Victoria decides to go to a resistance meeting with her best friend, Sylvia, they are captured by human traffickers targeting Polish teenagers. Sylvia is sent to work in a brothel, and Victoria is transported by cattle car to Berlin, where she is auctioned off as a slave.

GERMANY, 1941: Twenty-year-old Etta Tod is at Mercy Hospital about to undergo involuntary sterilization because of the Fuhrer’s mandate to eliminate hereditary deafness. Etta, an artist, silently critiques the propaganda poster on the waiting room wall while her mother tries to convince her she should be glad to get rid of her monthlies. Etta is the daughter of the German shopkeeper who buys Victoria at auction in Berlin.

The stories of Victoria and Etta intertwine in the bakery’s attic where Victoria is held—the same place where Etta has hidden her anti-Nazi paintings. The two women form a quick and enduring bond. But when they’re caught stealing bread from the bakery and smuggling it to a nearby work camp, everything changes.

A native Oregonian of Polish descent, Catherine A. Hamilton was born in the small town of Sweet Home, Oregon. After finishing high school, she moved to Portland where she graduated from Lewis and Clark College in 1984 with a Master’s degree in psychology. She spent 12 years as a psychotherapist, publishing dozens of articles in her field. She presented papers at the American Psychiatric Association’s Annual Meeting in New York City, and one article was featured in the NYT the following day. After joining a writing group and trying her hand at fiction, her stories, articles, and poems were published in magazines and newspapers—including the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, the Oregonian, the Catholic Sentinel, and the Polish American Journal. She closed her private practice and started writing fiction full-time. A local talk-news show interviewed Catherine on radio and television about a piece she wrote for Brainstorm Magazine, and she was also interviewed for TV after the death of Pope John Paul II. She had met the pope in his private library while on pilgrimage in Rome, and had presented him with some of her work. She also has a chapter in the book Forgotten Survivors (University Press of Kansas, 2004).

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Join us as we virtually celebrate the winner of the Fall 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, What Remains by Claudia Delfina Cardona.

What Remains is a collection of poems propelled by impulse, desire and an ancestral sense of longing. These poems are experiential; they exist within the dark and splendid catacombs of the body, in dusty moonlit Texas nights, and invite us into their own glittery mythos of what it means to be a young woman falling in and out of love in San Antonio.

This collection begins with a portrait of a Brown girl growing up in San Antonio: a girl whose “tongue [is] burnt from gas station coffee,” and who wears “a name dipped in gold.” She invites us to “lay [our] head / on [her] chest and listen,” to stir “your margarita / with a chamoy-coated straw”, and to play “a guessing game of gunshot / or firework.” We settle into the rich and storied landscape of San Antonio just in time to be lunged into a dimension of lust, loving, and longing, “toward someplace too dark for us to see—”, only to return to what remains.

Claudia Delfina Cardona is a poet born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. She received her B.A. from St. Mary’s University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University. In 2013, she co-founded Chifladazine alongside Laura Valdez, a zine that highlights creative work by Latinas and Latinxs. In 2019, she co-founded Infrarrealista Review, a literary journal for all types of Texan writers, with Linda Rivas Vázquez. Cardona loves music and films as much as she loves poetry. She is an aspiring DJ and cultural critic.

The Zoom link will be provided on this page a few days before the event. Please note: all guests will be muted during the event.

Everyone is warmly invited to join us for our newest book club, Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly, informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers (and with a bit of luck the authors themselves might sometimes be able to join us too!)

For our second meeting, we’ll be discussing Chaitali Sen’s The Pathless Sky, a haunting and moving novel that will appeal to readers who enjoyed Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. Chaitali will be joining us at some point during the discussion, so we can chat with her about this wonderful book and her writing career.

In The Pathless Sky, Chaitali Sen conjures a world in which a nation’s political turmoil, its secret history, and growing social unrest turn life into a fragile and capricious thing and love into a necessary refuge to be defended at all cost. A world, that is, not unlike the one we live in. John, a hapless young student with a potentially brilliant academic career ahead of him, and Mariam, a shy, preternaturally perceptive woman from the north, fall in love in college. Their early careers, their seemingly mismatched natures, and the alarming changes occurring in their country conspire to keep them apart for years. But a day comes when, across a great distance, both realize that they have always loved each other. During the intervening years, however, the troubles in their country have reached a critical impasse. Government crimes have been whitewashed, personal liberty is deeply compromised, a resistance movement has emerged from the underground to take the fight for freedom to the streets, and the government militia employs increasingly draconian measures in an attempt to maintain control.

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

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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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

This month’s title is Chercher La Femme by L. Timmel Duchamp.

They named the planet La Femme and called it a paradise and refused to leave it. Now Julia 9561 is heading up the mission to retrieve the errant crew and establish meaningful Contact with the inhabitants. Are the inhabitants really all female, as the first crew claimed? Why don’t the men want to return to Earth? What happened to the women on the crew? And why did Paul 22423 warn the First Council to send only male crew members?

“There’s some interesting tidal stirring going on at the more cerebral levels of modern SF, which I think began with books like A Voyage to Arcturus and Solaris. It’s now manifesting itself in, for example, Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach books and in this book, Chercher La Femme, as well as in films like Arrival, They Remain, and of course Annihilation. Human bafflement and consternation characterize these stories in the face of the most alien kind of alien-ness we can imagine at this point, and a necessary softening and yielding of our age-old infatuation with a propulsive, often violent drive to control (or kill) whatever is ineffable and strange to us.” —Suzy McKee Charnas, author of The Vampire Tapestry and the Holdfast Chronicles

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Join us for a Zoom reading featuring authors from independent press Four Way Books. Readers include Charlie Clark (The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin), Brian Komei Dempster (Seize), and Susan Buttenwieser (We Were Lucky with the Rain).

Charlie Clark’s poetry has appeared in New England Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and other journals. The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2020) is his debut collection. He studied poetry at the University of Maryland. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a 2019 NEA fellow in poetry. He lives in Austin, TX.

Brian Komei Dempster’s most recent book of poetry is Seize (Four Way Books 2020). His debut book of poetry, Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013), received the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry. His poems have been published widely in journals such as New England Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly, along with various anthologies, including Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (Norton, 2008) and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois, 2004). He is a professor of rhetoric and language at the University of San Francisco, where he serves as Director of Administration for the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies program.

Susan Buttenwieser’s writing has appeared in numerous publications. We Were Lucky with the Rain (Four Way Books 2020) is her first book. She teaches creative writing in New York City public schools and to incarcerated women.

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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 meeting will take place via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us regarding curbside pick up. (The copies we have at the store are hardcover and we are offering a 20% discount on them.)

On Saturday, October 24th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Time by Etel Adnan.

On October 27, 2003, Etel Adnan received a post card of a palm tree from the poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies in Tunisia, sparking a collection of poems that would unspool over the next decade in a continuous discovery of the present moment. Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments, then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.

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Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by W. Joe Hoppe. This event will take place via Zoom; details below.

This month’s featured reader is Nicky Drayden.

Nicky Drayden is a Systems Analyst who dabbles in prose when she’s not buried in code. She resides in Austin, Texas where being weird is highly encouraged, if not required. Her award-winning novel The Prey of Gods is set in a futuristic South Africa brimming with demigods, robots, and hallucinogenic hijinks, and with her new novel Escaping Exodus, she’ll be taking her weirdness off-world to a civilization living inside the gut of a moon-sized space beast.

Nicky’s novel can be purchased via our online store (https://bookshop.org/books/escaping-exodus/9780062867735), or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

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Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Copies will be available for purchase at the store.

To watch this reading, please go to the Youtube live event on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCclZdTQQCBXU1-PN9dBPR6g. If you have problems accessing the event, email becky@malvernbooks.com.

The issue’s keynote poet is Octavio Quintanilla.

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), and served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His poetry, fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Texas Highways, RHINO, The Rumpus, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage, Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature, and elsewhere. His visual poems have been exhibited in several galleries, including Presa House Gallery, Equinox Gallery, and at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, TX. He holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

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

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.

*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***

This month’s selection is Malicroix by Henri Bosco, translated from the French by Joyce Zonana. This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781681374109.

Henri Bosco, like his contemporary Jean Giono, is one of the regional masters of modern French literature, a writer who dwells above all on the grandeur, beauty, and ferocious unpredictability of the natural world. Malicroix, set in the early nineteenth century, is widely considered to be Bosco’s greatest book. Here he invests a classic coming-of-age story with a wild, mythic glamour.

A nice young man, of stolidly unimaginative, good bourgeois stock, is surprised to inherit a house on an island in the Rhône, in the famously desolate and untamed region of the Camargue. The terms of his great-uncle’s will are even more surprising: the young man must take up solitary residence in the house for a full three months before he will be permitted to take possession of it. With only a taciturn shepherd and his dog for occasional company, he finds himself surrounded by the huge and turbulent river (always threatening to flood the island and surrounding countryside) and the wind, battering at his all-too-fragile house, shrieking from on high. And there is another condition of the will, a challenging task he must perform, even as others scheme to make his house their own. Only under threat can the young man come to terms with both his strange inheritance and himself.

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.

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The Lion & the Pirate set off on their next online adventure, hope you’ll be aboard!

We’ll start with two featured readers (TBA), and then it will be your time to shine. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: we’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so we’ll screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e (and let us know if you have questions).

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event.

Everyone is warmly invited to join us for our newest book club, Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly, informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers (and with a bit of luck the authors themselves might sometimes be able to join us too!)

For our third meeting, we’ll be discussing Josh Denslow’s short story collection, Not Everyone Is Special. Josh will be joining us at some point during the discussion, so we can chat with him about this wonderful collection and his writing career.

“Josh Denslow’s stories are intricate, fun, and beautiful, though always about heartbreak and loss. They’re like perfect little castles made of jewels and lego bricks that rise out of a howling abyss.” —Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

“When we meet the characters in Josh Denslow’s stories, they’re almost always already in trouble, and then they go looking for even more–but they do so with such heart and humor that you’ll inevitably fall in love with them, even (or especially) when they’re behaving their well-meaning worst. Not Everyone is Special is a smart and funny debut, often satirical and always generous, perfect for fans of George Saunders or Sam Lipsyte.” —Matt Bell, author of Scrapper

Josh Denslow is the author of the collection Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books). Recent stories have appeared in Catapult, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Hobart, and Pithead Chapel. In addition to exploring dungeons in the Legend of Zelda with his three boys, he plays the drums in the band Borrisokane.

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

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Five brown authors of Hispanic, Filipino, and South Asian origins discuss what it is like being brown in America, how that has shaped their writing, and informed their latest books. We’ll talk about growing up brown and the experience of finding a place (physical or state of mind) to be brown in America through our work, relationships, family, community, etc.

This discussion will take place via Zoom and will be moderated by Martha Anne Toll. The panelists are: Donna Miscolta (Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories); Grace Talusan (The Body Papers); Sejal Shah (This Is One Way to Dance); Sopan Deb (Missed Translations); and Jenny Bhatt (Each of Us Killers: Stories).

Martha Anne Toll (top left) is the 2020 Winner of the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Her debut novel, Three Muses, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing, Fall 2022. Her fiction has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, eMerge, Slush Pile Magazine, Yale’s Letters Journal, Inkapture Magazine, Referential Magazine, and Poetica E Magazine. Martha’s essays and reviews appear regularly on NPR and in The Millions; as well as in the Washington Post, Washington Post’s The Lily, The Rumpus, Bloom, Scoundrel Time, Music & Literature, Words Without Borders [forthcoming], After the Art, Narrative Magazine, [PANK] Magazine, Cargo Literary, Tin House blog, The Nervous Breakdown, Heck Magazine, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Her personal essay, “Dayenu,” was selected for an anthology featuring a range of well-known writers such as Lidia Yuknavich, Kwame Alexander, Dani Shapiro, and Ada Limón.

Donna Miscolta’s (top middle) third book of fiction Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories, about lessons a young Mexican American girl learns in a world that favors neither her race nor gender, was published by Jaded Ibis Press in September 2020. Her story collection Hola and Goodbye, winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and published by Carolina Wren Press (2016), won an Independent Publishers award for Best Regional Fiction and an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction. She’s also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced from Signal 8 Press (2011), which poet Rick Barot called “intricate, tender, and elegantly written – a necessary novel for our times.” Recent essays appear in pif, Los Angeles Review, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 and a short story is forthcoming in Latinx Subjectivities: A multi-genre anthology.

Grace Talusan’s memoir, The Body Papers, is a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a winner in nonfiction for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Her short story, The Book of Life and Death, was chosen for the 2020 Boston Book Festival’s One City One Story program and was translated into several languages, including Tagalog. Currently, Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

Sejal Shah (bottom left) is the author of the debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press, 2020). Her stories and essays have appeared in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, the Kenyon Review Online, Literary Hub, Longreads, Poets & Writers, and The Rumpus. The recipient of a 2018 NYFA fellowship in fiction, Sejal recently completed a story collection and is at work on a memoir about mental health. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University and lives in Rochester, New York.

Sopan Deb (bottom middle) is a writer for the New York Times. Before joining the Times, he covered Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign for CBS News. He is also a New York-city based comedian. He is the author of the memoir Missed Translations: Meeting The Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me.

Jenny Bhatt (bottom right) is a writer, literary translator, and book critic. She’s also the host of the Desi Books podcast. Her debut story collection, Each of Us Killers, launched last month in the US with 7.13 Books. Her literary translation, Ratno Dholi: Dhumketu’s Best Short Stories, from Gujarati to English, is out this month with HarperCollins India. Her non-fiction writing has appeared or will be coming soon in NPR, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, Longreads, Literary Hub, Poets & Writers, and several more.

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Join us for a reading from Rachel Genn, whose second novel, What You Could Have Won, will be released by And Other Stories in early November.

This event will take place via Zoom; see details below. The novel can be purchased via our online store, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

“A captivating portrait of regret, addiction, and the will to survive.” —Publishers Weekly

Fame is the only thing worth having. Love is temporary brain damage. Or so thinks Henry Sinclair, a failing psychiatrist, whose career-breaking discovery has been pinched by a supervisor smelling of nipple grease and hot-dog brine. An emotional miser and manipulator par excellence, desperate for the recognition he’s certain his genius deserves, Henry claws his way into the limelight by transforming his girlfriend—a singer-in-ascendance, beloved for her cathartically raw performances—into a drug experiment. As he systematically works to reinforce feelings of worthlessness while at the same time feeding off Astrid’s fame, and as Astrid collapses deeper into dependence, what emerges is a two-sided toxic relationship: the bullying instincts of a man shrunk by an industry where bullying is currency, and the peculiar strength of a star more comfortable offloading her talent than owning her brilliance.

Pinging between their apartment in New York (where they watch endless episodes of The Sopranos), a nudist campsite in Greece (where the tantalizingly handsome Gigi thwacks octopuses into the sand), and a celebrity rehab facility in Paris (founded by the cassock-wearing and sex-scandal plagued ‘artist’ Hypno Ray), What You Could Have Won is a relationship born of regrettable events, and a novel about female resilience in the face of social control.

Rachel Genn is a neuroscientist, artist and writer who has written two novels: The Cure (2011) and What You Could Have Won (2020). She was a Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence (2016), creating The National Facility for the Regulation of Regret, which spanned installation art, VR and film (2016-17). She has written for Granta, 3:AM Magazine, and Hotel, and is working on Hurtling, a hybrid collection of essays about the neuroscience, art and abjection of artistic reverie. She’s also working on a binaural experience exploring paranoia, and a collection of non-fiction about fighting and addiction to regret. Genn works at the Manchester Writing School and the School of Digital Arts, both at Manchester Metropolitan University, and lives in Sheffield.

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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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

This month’s title is Who Is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht.

An exhilarating page turner and perceptive coming-of-age story, Who Is Vera Kelly? introduces an original, wry and whip-smart female spy for the twenty-first century.

“Gripping, subtle, magnificently written . . . This is a cool, strolling boulevardier of a book, worldly, wry, unrushed but never slow, which casts its gaze upon the middle of the last century and forces us to consider how it might be failing us still.” —The New York Times Book Review

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Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. This event will take place via Zoom; details below.

This month’s featured reader is ire’ne lara silva.

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.

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Join us in celebrating the release of Reading Quirks, a witty and light-hearted ode to the immense pleasure of reading and its resulting byproduct: neurosis. This event will feature author Andrés de la Casa Huertas.

This event will take place via Zoom; see details below. The book can be purchased via our online store, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or make an appointment to visit the store.

Who hasn’t peeked over the shoulder of the person reading next to them on the subway, curious about the book in their hands? Who doesn’t secretly love skipping the party to stay home and read? Who hasn’t daydreamed of catching the eye of a future significant other as you discover from across the room that you’re reading the same book? If you’re a reader, you know you’ve been there, and probably in so many other weird places as well, right? That’s what happens with readers, they have these strange traits, these particular ways, that separate them from the rest. Reading Quirks explores, in 72 lighthearted four-frame cartoons, all these weird things readers do, from the existential dilemma of picking your next read to the frustrations of watching an overzealous dog-earer in action. The series was written and created by a bookstore in Dallas, The Wild Detectives, originally as a social media campaign―a way to connect with other readers over a shared understanding of what it means to be crazy about books. Laura Pacheco’s adorable illustrations introduce a cast of endearing characters, whose flaws and obsessions range from disarming good nature to mischievous playfulness.

Reading Quirks is a work of nonfiction. You have in your hands an anthropological study of a strange and far-ranging human tribe, a tribe that gets from the reading of books the kind of happiness that other people derive from wrestling alligators. —Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Beautiful Country Burn Again

Authors Andrés de la Casa Huertas and Javier García del Moral are Spanish expats and longtime friends who run The Wild Detectives as creative and executive directors, respectively. They combine these efforts with their day jobs in advertising the former, and civil engineering the latter. Reading Quirks is their first publication.

Laura Pacheco is an awarded Spanish illustrator and cartoonist. She’s the author of several graphic novels in Spain, such as Señor Pacheco: agente secreto (¡Caramba!, 2013) and Problemas del primer mundo (Lumen, 2014). Along with her sister, the author Carmen Pacheco, they’ve also published Una semana en familia (¡Caramba!, 2011), Troll Corporation (¡Caramba!, 2018) and Divas de diván (¡Caramba!, 2018).

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We’re delighted to announce the launch of our newest book club, A Season Of, in which we’ll spend several splendid months reading and discussing books by a single author. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. Our first pick is the acclaimed Argentinian writer César Aira, and for our first meeting we’ll be talking about The Hare, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor.

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “season of aira” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

Clarke is a nineteenth-century English naturalist who roams the pampas in search of an elusive animal: the Legibrerian hare, whose defining quality seems to be its ability to fly. The local tribesmen, pointing skyward, tell him about recent sightings of the hare, but then they ask Clarke to help them search for their missing chief, as well. On further investigation Clarke finds more than meets the eye: in the Mapuche and Voroga languages every word has at least two meanings.

Witty, very ironic, and with all the usual Airian digressive magic, The Hare offers subtle reflections on love, Victorian-era colonialism, and the many ambiguities of language.

César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

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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 meeting will take place via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us regarding curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store. (This is a hardcover title and we are offering a 10% discount on our copies.)

On Saturday, November 28th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Envelope Poems by Emily Dickinson.

Although a very prolific poet―and arguably America’s greatest―Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. Instead, she created at home small handmade books. When, in her later years, she stopped producing these, she was still writing a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters. It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson’s later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy―addressed to no one and everyone at once.

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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 meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***

This month’s selection is A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590173008.

L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s will, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends day and night on demolition and construction. At last he has a mission: he will dig up the lost history of his house; he will restore it to its past grandeur. He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.

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.

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Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our brand-new Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary!

** This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “Smashing book club” in the subject line. ***

Our first book is Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781632062239.

A Peruvian journalist’s vibrant musings on pregnancy and childbirth. In this whip-smart follow-up to Sexographies (2018), the author details her nine months of pregnancy as anything but pastel. Wiener interweaves facts on embryonic development and other scientific elements with visceral experience and accounts of her rabbit-hole internet searches to reveal the anxiety of her first full-term pregnancy…. Such dark, fertile forays signal Wiener’s original take on the simultaneously common and unique experience of pregnancy…. The author’s ruminations are consistently provocative, digging into areas many are not willing to go…. Wiener’s reflections on her relationship with her mother, which included microaggressions and tense exchanges, are also illuminating…. Refreshingly literary and offbeat—a mother-to-be book for firebrands. —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

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Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. This event will take place via Zoom; details below.

This month’s featured reader is Richard Santos.

Richard Z. Santos is a writer and teacher in Austin. His debut novel, Trust Me, was published in March 2020. He is a Board Member of The National Book Critics Circle and served as one of the 2019 Nonfiction Judges for The Kirkus Prize. Recent work can be found in Texas Monthly, Awst Press, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads, and many more. In a previous career he worked for some of the nation’s top political campaigns, consulting firms, and labor unions.

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Join the celebration as poets from across Texas read about the diverse culture, iconography, and geography of our home state. Come share the holiday spirit via Zoom!

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Everyone is warmly invited to join us for Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly, informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers (and with a bit of luck the authors themselves might sometimes be able to join us too!)

For our fourth meeting, we’ll be discussing Stealing Home: A Father, a Son, and the Road to the Perfect Game by Ron Seybold. Ron will be joining us at some point during the discussion, so we can chat with him about this wonderful book and his writing career.

In an epic road trip with his Little League son, a divorced dad’s eight-ballpark journey tries to rescue his fatherhood—and learn how his dad’s suicide might not doom him to repeat a father’s mistakes.

The rarest outcome in sports is baseball’s perfect game. One team does everything right, forcing the other to accomplish nothing. In 150 years of baseball, there have only been 23. Perfect is nearly impossible. As a divorced dad, Ron was trying to redeem his fatherhood with a road trip with his son. Their odyssey of crossing eight states in a rented convertible was supposed to salvage Ron’s life as an unsure father. Custody fatherhood demoted him to the second team—he was certain of that. One sign of salvation came unbidden in an unscheduled tenth game. Thousands of miles and dozens of innings delivered a discovery: a drive toward perfect fatherhood has a destination that cannot be found on any map. It’s the tale of an eleven-day, nine-game trip —and how a father’s plans for perfection delivered things deeper than scores, miles, and smiles. Something magical and rare appeared at the end, in his heart as well as on a diamond.

“Part baseball, part fatherhood, and all boyhood, Stealing Home plays out the mystery of love and family. Fueled by his determination to become a better dad, Seybold’s journey becomes a quest to reconcile the past and his future. The magic lies in the storytelling that travels the road to something perfect.” —Donna Johnson, author of Holy Ghost Girl: A Memoir

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or make an appointment to visit.

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Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months reading and discussing books by a single author. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. Our first pick is the acclaimed Argentinian writer César Aira. This month’s book is Ghosts.

Ghosts is about a construction worker’s family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter’s life hangs in the balance. Ghosts is the most unsettling and stunning of Aira’s short novels published so far by New Directions.

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “season of aira” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit.

César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

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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.

Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit. We are offering a 10% discount on our in-store copies.

This month’s title is That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye.

Herman’s wife and child are nowhere to be found, and the weather in the village, perfectly agreeable just days earlier, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tourist season is over. It’s time for the vacationing Parisians to abandon their rural getaways and return to normal life. But where has Herman’s family gone? A literary horror story about power and assimilation, That Time of Year marks NDiaye once again as a contemporary master of the psychological novel. Working in the spirit of Leonora Carrington and  Kōbō Abe, NDiaye’s novel is a nightmarish vision of otherness, privilege, and social amnesia, told with potent clarity and a heady dose of the weird.

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