Malvern Books

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.”

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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, 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:

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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.

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

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

Click here to join.

Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597

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

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597

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+13462487799,,2829783950#,,,,0#,,788597# US (Houston)

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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).

* * *

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597

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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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.

On Saturday, December 26th at 1pm Lucille Clifton’s “Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000.”

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Lucille Clifton, one of America’s most important and distinguished poets, employs brilliantly honed language, stunning images, and sharp rhythms to address the whole of human experience. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to confront our most salient issues.

“Although her work is often spare and simple, it is always beautifully and painstakingly crafted into poems that tell the truth, poems that insist on residing within the reader, poems by a poet who seeks and achieves the ability to be a vehicle for those who may not otherwise speak.” —Web Del Sol Review of Books

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 During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase. 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/2325/9781590177150.

Joan Chase’s subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of “joy and ruin” deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. The Queen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife who presides over a household of daughters and granddaughters. The novel tells their stories through the eyes of the youngest members of the family, four cousins who spend summers on the farm, for them both a life-giving Eden and the source of terrible discoveries about desire and loss. The girls bicker and scrap, they whisper secrets at bedtime, and above all, they observe the kinds of women their mothers are and wonder what kind of women they will become. But always present is the family’s great trauma, the decline and eventual death from cancer of Gram’s daughter Grace. A powerful story about family ties and tensions, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a book about place, charting the transformation of the old hardscrabble Midwest into the commercial wilderness of modern America. 

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:

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Ready for the Lion & Pirate in 2021? We are! Start the new year off with your inclusive open mic pals (and tell Laura happy birthday)!

We’ll start with two featured readers, 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 Info:
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Meeting ID: 853 2311 8334
Password: 146923

Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our 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. ***

This month’s pick is The Crying Book by Heather Christle. 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/2325/9781948226448.

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen-tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.

Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

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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 next meeting, we’ll be discussing Waking Up in Medellin by Kathryn Lane.

Page-turner author Kathryn Lane’s protagonist, Nikki Garcia, is sent to Medellin, Colombia, on assignment. Nikki embarks on an action-adventure as she investigates high stakes, mega-money corruption, grapples with her own ghosts, and yet finds romance in a foreign country. Then she’s kidnapped and she’ll have one shot at surviving…

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 at the store; call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or make an appointment to visit.

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Join us in celebrating the launch of Boyd Taylor’s The Pronghorn Conspiracy, book five of the Donnie Ray Cuinn Series. This event will take place via Zoom; details below.

In the final book of the Donnie Ray Cuinn series, Donnie finds himself embroiled in a foreign plot against the President of the United States and uncovers a terrorist plan to steal a powerful secret from a nearby nuclear weapons plant. For reasons unknown to Donnie, the terrorists will deal only with him, so he is brought in to work alongside the FBI, Secret Service, and Vice President in an attempt to thwart the intricate scheme. Already at a breaking point in his life, Donnie must do what he can to negotiate the safety of the President, save the communities within range of the nuclear facility, and rescue all those he cares about.

As the crisis unfolds and Donnie struggles to understand why a terrorist leader claims to know him, he finds his relationships in imminent danger. He has to figure out how to move on from the guilt and demons of his past or risk losing his wife, his friends, and himself.

In this action thriller, Boyd Taylor delivers a gripping story filled with political discord and ambition, suspense, and unexpected twists. The Pronghorn Conspiracy is Donnie Ray Cuinn’s last chance to right the wrongs before him and see if he can make it back from the point of no return.

Boyd Taylor is a graduate of the University of Texas and the UT Law School. He is the author of four other novels—Hero, The Antelope Play, The Monkey House, and Necessities—and lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife.

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 861 3395 2723
Passcode: 559293

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 The Seamstress and the Wind.

The Seamstress and the Wind is a deliciously laugh-out-loud-funny novel. A seamstress who is sewing a wedding dress for the pregnant local art teacher fears that her son, while playing in a big semitruck, has been accidentally kidnapped and driven off to Patagonia. Completely unhinged, she calls a local taxi to follow the semi in hot pursuit. When her husband finds out what’s happened, he takes off after wife and child. They race not only to the end of the world, but to adventures in desire – where the wild Southern wind falls in love with the seamstress, and a monster child takes up with the truck driver. Interspersed are Aira’s musings about memory and childhood, and his hometown of Coronel Pringles, with a compelling view of the hard lot of this working-class town, situated not far from Buenos Aires.

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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Join Zoom Meeting:

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Meeting ID: 883 6841 2743
Passcode: 003487

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 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.

This month’s title is The So Blue Marble by Dorothy B. Hughes.

The society pages announce it before she even arrives: Griselda Satterlee, daughter of the princess of Rome, has left her career as an actress behind and is traveling to Manhattan to reinvent herself as a fashion designer. They also announce the return of the dashing Montefierrow twins to New York after a twelve-year sojourn in Europe. But there is more to this story than what’s reported, which becomes clear when the three meet one evening during a walk, and their polite conversation quickly takes a menacing turn. The twins are seeking a rare and powerful gem and they believe it’s stashed in the unused apartment where Griselda is staying. Baffled by the request, she pushes them away, but they won’t take no for an answer…

Drenched in the glamour and luxury of the New York elite, The So Blue Marble is a perfectly Art Deco suspense novel in which nothing is quite as it seems. While different in style from her later books, Dorothy B. Hughes’s debut highlights her greatest strengths as an author, rendered with both the poetic language and the psychology of fear for which she is known today.

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Meeting ID: 861 9362 0594
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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.

On Saturday, January 23rd at 1pm we’ll be discussing Maggie Nelson’s Something Bright, Then Holes.

Before Maggie Nelson’s name became synonymous with such genre-defying, binary-slaying writing as The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty, this collection of poetry introduced readers to a singular voice in the making: exhilarating, fiercely vulnerable, intellectually curious, and one of a kind.

These days/the world seems to split up/into those who need to dredge/and those who shrug their shoulders/and say, It’s just something/that happened.

While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelson’s incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in Something Bright, Then Holes. Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital room of a friend, Nelson charts each emotional landscape she encounters with unparalleled precision and empathy. Since its publication in 2007, the collection has proven itself to be both a record of a singular vision in the making as well as a timeless meditation on love, loss, and―perhaps most frightening of all―freedom.

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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Aaron Fagan’s third poetry collection A Better Place is Hard to Find, featuring Aaron, Nick Flynn, and other guests.

A Better Place is Hard to Find can be purchased from the store—call 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up—or via our bookshop.org site.

Revealing the profusion of life “Where silence / And all possible / Outcomes bathe // In simultaneity,” the poems in Aaron Fagan’s astonishing third collection, A Better Place Is Hard to Find, carefully tune their lines, breaks, and turns of phrase to the acoustics of the author’s lived experience. A master of giving shape to thought, Fagan’s absorbing poems about love, relationships, philosophy, and his personal history reveal the intimate function poetry can hold in the course of examining one’s life.

“Aaron Fagan’s A Better Place Is Hard to Find contains some of the finest poems I’ve read in years. At once fluid, blistering, and visionary, Fagan’s poems are marvels that I admire for their beauty, their craft, and their fearlessness in the search for truth. What a poet!” —Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Aaron Fagan was born in Rochester, New York, in 1973 and educated at Hampshire College and Syracuse University. His poems have appeared in: Granta, Harper’s, Poem-A-Day, and The Yale Review. His third poetry collection, A Better Place Is Hard to Find, was published this past fall by The Song Cave.

Nick Flynn is a writer, playwright, and poet. His most recent books are This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), a hybrid memoir, and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. His acclaimed 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro in 2012. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including most recently I Will Destroy You (2019). Flynn’s poems, essays, and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and on NPR’s This American Life. His film credits include “field poet” and artistic collaborator for the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.

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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 Conversations with Beethoven by Sanford Friedman. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590177624.

Deaf as he was, Beethoven had to be addressed in writing, and he was always accompanied by a notebook in which people could scribble questions and comments. Conversations with Beethoven, in a tour de force of fictional invention, tells the story of the last year of Beethoven’s life almost entirely through such notebook entries: Friends, family, students, doctors, and others attend to the volatile Maestro, whose sometimes unpredictable and often very loud replies we infer. A fully fleshed and often very funny portrait of Beethoven emerges. He struggles with his music and with his health; he argues with and insults just about everyone. Most of all, he worries about his wayward—and beloved—nephew Karl. A large cast of Dickensian characters surrounds the great composer at the center of this wonderfully engaging novel, which deepens in the end to make a memorable music of its own.

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 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. ***

This month’s pick is The Body Papers by Grace Talusan. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781632061836.

Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of Talusan’s debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.

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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 next meeting, we’ll be discussing Dreams of Shreds and Tatters by Amanda Downum.

When Liz Drake’s best friend vanishes, nothing can stop her nightmares. Driven by the certainty he needs her help, she crosses a continent to search for him. She finds Blake comatose in a Vancouver hospital, victim of a mysterious accident that claimed his lover’s life. Blake’s new circle of artists and mystics draws her in, but all of them are lying or keeping dangerous secrets. Soon nightmare creatures stalk the waking city, and Liz can’t fight a dream from the daylight world: to rescue Blake she must brave the darkest depths of the dreamlands…. Dreams of Shreds and Tatters is a literary debut of Lovecraftian magnificence.

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 at the store; call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or make an appointment to visit.

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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 Jacob Grovey.

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 Shantytown.

Maxi—a middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires’s shantytown—attracts the attention of a corrupt, trigger-happy policeman who will use anyone (including two innocent teenage girls) to break a drug ring that he believes is operating within the slum. A strange new drug, a secret code within a carousel of pirated lights, the kindness of strangers, murder…

No matter how serious the subject matter, and despite Aira’s “fascination with urban violence and the sinister underside of Latin American politics” (The Millions), Shantytown, like all of Aira’s mesmerizing work, is filled with wonder and mad invention.

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.

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.

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.

This month’s title is The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan by Stuart Palmer.

Hildegarde Withers is just your average school teacher—with above-average skills in the art of deduction. The New Yorker often finds herself investigating crimes led only by her own meddlesome curiosity, though her friends on the NYPD don’t mind when she solves their cases for them. After plans for a grand tour of Europe are interrupted by Germany’s invasion of Poland, Miss Withers heads to sunny Los Angeles instead, where her vacation finds her working as a technical advisor on the set of a film adaptation of the Lizzie Borden story. The producer has plans for an epic retelling of the historical killer’s patricidal spree—plans which are derailed when a screenwriter turns up dead…

At once a pleasantly complex locked room mystery and a hilarious look at the foibles of Hollywood, The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan finds Palmer, a screenwriter himself, at his most perceptive. Reprinted for the first time in over thirty years, this riotously funny novel shows why Hildegarde Withers was among the most beloved detectives of the Golden Age American mystery novel.

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Join us for a reading with four authors from independent press Four Way Books: Angela Narciso Torres (What Happens Is Neither); Reginald Gibbons (Renditions); Kevin Prufer (The Art of Fiction); and Rodney Terich Leonard (Sweetgum & Lightning).

This event will take place via Zoom; details to come.

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry, 2013), To the Bone (Sundress Publications, 2020), and What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books, 2021). Recent work appears in Poetry, Missouri Review, and Quarterly West. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She won the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York) and was named one of NewCityLit’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago in 2016. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO Poetry. She lives in Southern California.

Reginald Gibbons has published eleven books of poems. He was born and raised in Houston; for decades has taught creative writing at Northwestern University and the Warren Wilson MFA. He has won four prizes from the Texas Institute of Letters—for novel, short story, poetry book, and book of translations.

Kevin Prufer is the author of eight books of poetry and the editor of numerous anthologies, the most recent of which are The Art of Fiction, How He Loved Them, and, Churches, all from Four Way Books. He’s also co-editor of New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016), and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press). Prufer is Editor-at-Large of Pleiades: Literature in Context, Co-Curator of the Unsung Masters Series, and Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University. Among Prufer’s awards and honors are four Pushcart prizes and multiple Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Prairie Schooner/Strousse Award, two William Rockhill Nelson awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. His most recent book was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for best poetry book from the American literary press.

Rodney Terich Leonard was born in Nixburg, Alabama. An Air Force veteran who served during the Gulf War, his society profiles and poems have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Red River Review, The Huffington Post, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, Indolent Books-What Rough Beast, Four Way Review, the New York Times, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys… (anthology edited by Keith Boykin), and other publications. Sweetgum & Lightning is his debut collection of poetry. He holds degrees from The New School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Teachers College Columbia University. A Callaloo poetry fellow, he received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and currently lives in Manhattan.

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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.

On Saturday, February 27th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Cameron Awkward-Rich’s Dispatch.

In his second collection, Cameron Awkward-Rich reckons with American violence, while endeavoring to live and love in its shadow. Set against a media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, these poems grapple with news of racial and gendered violence in the United States today an in its past.

“The poems in Awkward-Rich’s second collection speak with a poised urgency out of profound, enduring fear imposed by impossibly huge forces… and steady themselves, when steadiness seems possible, on the fact of an undiminishable self beyond language.” —American Poets

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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 The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781681374642.

Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
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Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our 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. ***

This month’s pick is A World Between by Emily Hashimoto. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781936932955.

In 2004, college students Eleanor Suzuki and Leena Shah meet in an elevator. Both girls are on the brink of adulthood, each full of possibility and big ideas, and they fall into a whirlwind romance. Years later, Eleanor and Leena collide on the streets of San Francisco. Although grown and changed and each separately partnered, the two find themselves, once again, irresistibly pulled back together.c Emily Hashimoto’s debut novel perfectly captures the wonder and confusion of growing up and growing closer. Narrated in sparkling prose, A World Between follows two strikingly different but interconnected women as they navigate family, female friendship, and their own fraught history.

“A sweeping debut novel about the ever changing nature of identity and love.” —Kirkus Reviews

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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 W. Joe Hoppe.

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

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Join us for a Zoom reading to celebrate the recent launch of Brian Phillip Whalen’s SEMIOTIC LOVE [STORIES]. Featuring Brian, plus special guests Amy Long and Richard Z. Santos.

SEMIOTIC LOVE [STORIES] draws upon symbols and objects to explore the loss of relationships. In these pages, Brian Phillip Whalen reaches deep into the throat of anxiety with a graceful hand and understated humor as he confronts mothers and best friends dying slow or sudden deaths, disappointing vacations, and vanishing sisters. While loss of all kinds permeates these compact stories, it is the tenderness and longing that attaches itself to the reader and propels them to turn the page. This book reminds us that for better or for worse, we’re all a little rougher with the people we love the most.

Brian Phillip Whalen’s work can be found in The Southern Review, Creative Nonfiction, Copper Nickel, the Flash Nonfiction Food anthology, and elsewhere. Brian holds a PhD from the State University of New York at Albany and is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency. He lives with his wife and daughter in Tuscaloosa where he teaches creative and first-year writing at The University of Alabama. This is his first book.

Amy Long is the author of Codependence (2019), chosen by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2018 Essay Collection Competition. She is a contributing editor to the drug history blog Points and runs the Instagram account @taylorswift_as_books. Her work has appeared in Diagram, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, including as a Notable essay in Best American Essays 2019.

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 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 An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas’ trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the “physiognomic totality” of von Humboldt’s scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.

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.

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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Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Spring 2021 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, lily someson’s mistaken for loud comets.

Copies of the book are available for purchase at the store, or online via bookshop.org.

* * * To view this event live on Feb 27th at 7pm, please visit our YouTube channel. * * *

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 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.

This month’s title is The Butchers’ Blessing by Ruth Gilligan

Set in the gothic wilds of Ireland, The Butchers’ Blessing is a haunting and unforgettable thriller brimming with secrecy, tradition, and superstition.

Every year, Úna prepares for her father to leave her. He will wave goodbye early one morning, then disappear with seven other men to traverse the Irish countryside. Together, these men form the Butchers, a group that roams from farm to farm, enacting ancient methods of cattle slaughter.

The Butchers’ Blessing moves between the events of 1996 and the present, offering a simmering glimpse into the modern tensions that surround these eight fabled men. Thrilling, dark, and richly atmospheric, The Butchers’ Blessing is an engrossing incantation—mesmerizing in both language and story—conjuring a family and a country on the edge of irrevocable change.

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We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Claire, 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.

On Saturday, March 27th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Anodyne by Khadijah Queen.

The poems that make up Anodyne consider the small moments that enrapture us alongside the daily threats of cataclysm. Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure—all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen’s poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live.

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