Welcome to Malvern Books!
Malvern Books is now closed. Malvern Books was a bookstore and community space in Austin, Texas. We specialized in visionary literature and poetry from independent publishers, with a focus on lesser-known and emerging voices.
An Update from the Manager of Malvern Books
Dear Friends,
We’ve had a wonderful time sharing our favorite books with you over the past nine years, and it’s been an honor to celebrate the work of so many brilliant writers through our readings and events.
Malvern Books is the realization of Joe Bratcher’s vision—Joe dreamt of a bookstore that would carry the books he loved, mostly poetry and fiction from small, independent presses. He wanted to promote writers and translators of books from other countries, while also championing the work of local writers.
When Joe first talked to me about opening Malvern Books, I must admit I was skeptical. I didn’t think we’d find an audience. It was 2012 and everyone was saying that bookstores were dead, Kindle and online shopping were the future. I anticipated many quiet sales days, with Joe and I just sitting there, looking at each other. He told me if that’s how it ended up, well, at least we’d have a chance to chat—and since we always seemed to laugh a lot when we talked, it sounded like a good way to spend some time. And so from then on, whenever we’d have a really slow sales day, with just a few people coming in, we’d look at each other and say, “We’re living the dream!” and we’d laugh.
But back to opening… in early 2013, with the help of our amazing architect, contractor, and interior designer, we created the space that Joe had in mind. We started posting on social media thanks to Tracey, our wonderful digital media manager and first Malvern hire. And we were so grateful to the many enthusiastic writers and readers who expressed their excitement at the imminent arrival of Malvern Books. From the very beginning it felt like we were building a community.
We opened our doors in October 2013, and we were shocked by how many people came by. You showed up and you loved what we had to offer! You constantly surprised and humbled us with your kind words and helpful suggestions. People from out of town would visit the store because a local friend had told them they had to come by, and we received much appreciated shout-outs from the Austin Chronicle and numerous other newspapers and journals.
And then 2020 hit—but even with the pandemic, we had loyal customers who came by for curbside pick ups, signed up for individual shopping appointments, and participated in our Zoom book clubs and events. If we didn’t say it enough, THANK YOU!
All along the way, we were lucky enough to have truly wonderful staff members who loved the books we carried and who helped us build the store we have now. Their work has been invaluable and we could not have done this without them.
On July 28th of this year, we lost Joe. I can’t tell you how hard it has been to try and carry on in this space without him. Our little Malvern world has not been the same since, and, as much as we love this store and our amazing customers, Malvern Books simply cannot continue without our Joe.
Malvern Books will be closing on December 31st, 2022. It has been a wonderful nine years and we thank each and every one of our cherished customers, friends, staff, and suppliers for helping us along the way.
As we move forward, we’ll be sharing our plans with you for sales and specials. For now, we just wanted to let you know this was coming. We hope you all continue to seek out works in translation and books published by small presses—there is so much great stuff out there—and that you continue to support our local independent bookstores, like our dear friends at BookWoman, among others. But, most importantly, we hope to see you in the store sometime soon, to say goodbye and to thank you, both for being the readers that you are and because you have come with us on this incredibly fulfilling journey in Joe’s world.
With heartfelt thanks and wishing you all the best,
Becky Garcia,
Manager, Malvern Books
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 Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
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.
Join Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597