Malvern Books

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted this month by Malvern’s Stephen K. 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 tracey@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

October’s selection is Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, translated from the Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies.

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood–the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.

But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man–whom he has asked to look after his wife–in an unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and now has over 500 titles in print. NYRB Classics includes new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Dante, and Chekhov; fiction by contemporary masters such as Magda Szabó, Tove Jansson, William Gaddis, and Uwe Johnson; tales of crime and punishment by Dorothy B. Hughes and Kenneth Fearing, among others; masterpieces of narrative history, literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, and memoirs from such writers as Eve Babitz, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Charles Simic; and unclassifiable classics on the order of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Join Zoom Meeting:

Everyone is warmly invited to join us for Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly and informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers—and the authors themselves will join us for a Q & A following our discussion. Lone Star Lit offers readers a chance to chat with local authors about their work and learn more about the writing process!

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book will be available via our online store or at Malvern Books. We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

For our October meeting, we’ll be discussing Stacey Swann’s debut novel Olympus, Texas, and Stacey will join us for part of the discussion.

The Briscoe family is once again the talk of their small town when March returns to East Texas two years after he was caught having an affair with his brother’s wife. His mother, June, hardly welcomes him back with open arms. Her husband’s own past affairs have made her tired of being the long-suffering spouse. Is it, perhaps, time for a change? Within days of March’s arrival, someone is dead, marriages are upended, and even the strongest of alliances are shattered. In the end, the ties that hold them together might be exactly what drag them all down.

An expansive tour de force, Olympus, Texas cleverly weaves elements of classical mythology into a thoroughly modern family saga, rich in drama and psychological complexity. After all, at some point, don’t we all wonder: What good is this destructive force we call love?

Olympus, Texas is an Indie Next Pick, a Good Morning America Book Club selection, and was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Swann holds an M.F.A. from Texas State University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in LitHub, Electric Literature, NER Digital, Epoch, and other journals. She splits her time between Austin and Lampasas.

Join Zoom meeting:

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “mystery book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. (Call us on 512-322-2097 if you’d prefer curbside pick up.) We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

October’s pick is The Master Key by Masako Togawa, translated by Simon Grove.

The Master Key is the prize-winning debut mystery from one of Japan’s best-loved crime writers. The K Apartments for Ladies are occupied by over one hundred unmarried women, once young and lively, now grown and old—and in some cases, evil. Their residence conceals a secret connecting the unsolved 1951 kidnapping of four-year-old George Kraft to the clandestine burial of a child’s body in the basement bath-house. So, when news comes that the building must be moved to make way for a road-building project, more than one tenant waits with apprehension for the grisly revelation that will follow. Then the master key is lost, stolen and re-stolen—and suddenly no-one feels safe. Fiendish intrigue, double identity and an ingenious plot make this a thriller worthy of comparison with the work of P.D. James.

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Join Zoom Meeting:

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Meeting ID: 856 5055 8889
Passcode: 056309

Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. For the next few months we’ll be discussing Croatian novelist Daša Drndić, and our October book is EEG.

In this breathtaking final work, Dasa Drndic reaches new heights. Andreas Ban’s suicide attempt has failed. Though very ill, he still finds the will to tap on the glass of history to summon those imprisoned within. Mercilessly, he dissects society and his environment, shunning all favors as he goes after the evils and hidden secrets of our times. History remembers the names of the perpetrators, not the victims—Ban remembers and honors the lost. He travels from Rijeka to Zagreb, from Belgrade to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian castles. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the CIA and died peacefully in their beds. Ban’s family is with him too, those already dead and those with one foot in the grave. As if left with only a few pieces in a chess game, Andreas Ban—and Dasa Drndic—play a stunning last match against Death.

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “season of book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. (Call us on 512-322-2097 if you’d prefer curbside pick up.) We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

Daša Drndić (1946 – 2018) was a Croatian writer. She is best known for her acclaimed novel Sonnenschein (2007), which was translated into English as Trieste and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She was also awarded the 2018 Warwick Prize for Belladonna, which the Times Literary Supplement called “one of the strangest and strongest books.” Her final book, EEG, won the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. In Drndić’s obituary in The Guardian, Amanda Hopkinson wrote, “[She] was incapable of writing a sentence that was not forceful, fierce or funny—or all three simultaneously. A major theme in her life’s writing, which comprised a dozen novels and some 30 plays, has been the overlooked (or deliberately omitted) complicity of her native Croatia in the Holocaust, expressed in a style that has been described by critics as ‘neo-Borgesian.'” Drndić was also a longstanding activist in PEN Croatia and the Croatian Writers’ Association, and in numerous free speech and human rights campaigns.

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Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82152478111?pwd=RGE4NXQzYlJNREtpdXFiYXhEckw2Zz09

Meeting ID: 821 5247 8111
Passcode: 620875

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted this month by Malvern’s Stephen K. 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 tracey@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

November’s selection is The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane, and we’ll be reading and discussing the first novel in the collection, “To Walk the Night.”

In the 1930s, William Sloane wrote two brilliant novels that gave a whole new meaning to cosmic horror. In To Walk the Night, Bark Jones and his college buddy Jerry Lister, a science whiz, head back to their alma mater to visit a cherished professor of astronomy. They discover his body, consumed by fire, in his laboratory, and an uncannily beautiful young widow in his house—but nothing compares to the revelation that Jerry and Bark encounter in the deserts of Arizona at the end of the book. 

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and now has over 500 titles in print. NYRB Classics includes new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Dante, and Chekhov; fiction by contemporary masters such as Magda Szabó, Tove Jansson, William Gaddis, and Uwe Johnson; tales of crime and punishment by Dorothy B. Hughes and Kenneth Fearing, among others; masterpieces of narrative history, literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, and memoirs from such writers as Eve Babitz, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Charles Simic; and unclassifiable classics on the order of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Join Zoom Meeting:

Everyone is warmly invited to join us for Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly and informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers—and the authors themselves will join us for a Q & A following our discussion. Lone Star Lit offers readers a chance to chat with local authors about their work and learn more about the writing process!

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book will be available via our online store or at Malvern Books. We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

For our November meeting, we’ll be discussing Let Me Count the Ways: A Memoir by Tomás Q. Morín, and Tomás will join us for part of the discussion.

Growing up in a small town in South Texas in the eighties and nineties, poverty, machismo, and drug addiction were everywhere for Tomás Q. Morín. He was around four or five years old when he first remembers his father cooking heroin, and he recalls many times he and his mother accompanied his father while he was on the hunt for more, Morín in the back seat keeping an eye out for unmarked cop cars, just as his father taught him. It was on one of these drives that, for the first time, he blinked in a way that evolution hadn’t intended.

Let Me Count the Ways is the memoir of a journey into obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mechanism to survive a childhood filled with pain, violence, and unpredictability. Morín’s compulsions were a way to hold onto his love for his family in uncertain times until OCD became a prison he struggled for decades to escape. Tender, unflinching, and even funny, this vivid portrait of South Texas life challenges our ideas about fatherhood, drug abuse, and mental illness.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author most recently of the poetry collection Machete and the memoir Let Me Count the Ways. He is coeditor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, Slate, and Boston Review.

Join Zoom meeting:

Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. For the next month, we’ll be discussing Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai.

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “season of book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. (Call us on 512-322-2097 if you’d prefer curbside pick up.) We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

“An elegant—and newly useful—meditation…As much as The Last Samurai is a novel about a mother’s struggle to raise a son on her own, it is also a novel about art—not making art, but consuming it and engaging with it in a million informal, inappropriate, but profoundly meaningful ways.” —Slate

Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t know: his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.

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Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86770537623?pwd=L1l4aWtDTDFCNGhIcE1QRnpraTUyQT09

Meeting ID: 867 7053 7623
Passcode: 035211

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “mystery book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. (Call us on 512-322-2097 if you’d prefer curbside pick up.) We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

November’s pick is The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle by Timothy Miller.

Sherlock Holmes has retired to the Sussex countryside… that is, until a most formidable puzzle is dropped upon his doorstep by a certain Colonel Pickering. One Miss Eliza Doolittle, once nothing more than a cockney guttersnipe, has been transformed into a proper lady of London—perhaps even a duchess?—as if overnight. When Col. Pickering recovered from a bout of malaria, he was astounded at the woman before him. Is it possible this transformation is due to nothing more than elocution lessons and some splendid new hats? Or has Professor Henry Higgins surreptitiously traded one girl for another? And for God’s sake, why?

As the case unfolds, Holmes and Watson find themselves in ever stranger territory. Who are the four identical “Freddies” pursuing Miss Doolittle? What part do the respected Dr. Jekyll and his malevolent associate, Mr. Hyde, long thought dead, have to play in this caper? And who the devil is the devilish Baron von Stettin?

The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle is an enthralling escapade starring some of Victorian literature’s most beloved characters—a historical mystery that will leave you delighted, perplexed, and positively bewildered.

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Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88079068628?pwd=aUVDTjNzY0g1WWpuQ1cxUmcyd21tZz09

Meeting ID: 880 7906 8628
Passcode: 157630

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted this month by Malvern’s Stephen K. 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 tracey@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

December’s selection is Peach Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei, translated by Canaan Morse.

An enthralling story of revolution, idealism, and a savage struggle for utopia by one of China’s greatest living novelists.

In 1898 reformist intellectuals in China persuaded the young emperor that it was time to transform his sclerotic empire into a prosperous modern state. The Hundred Days’ Reform that followed was a moment of unprecedented change and extraordinary hope–brought to an abrupt end by a bloody military coup. Dashed expectations would contribute to the revolutionary turn that Chinese history would soon take, leading in time to the deaths of millions.

Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at his estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative. This mysterious man has a great vision of reforging China as an egalitarian utopia, and he will stop at nothing to make it real. It is his own plans, however, which come to nothing, and his “little sister” Xiumi is left to take up arms against a Confucian world in which women are chattel. Her campaign for change and her struggle to seize control over her own body are continually threatened by the violent whims of men who claim to be building paradise.

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and now has over 500 titles in print. NYRB Classics includes new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Dante, and Chekhov; fiction by contemporary masters such as Magda Szabó, Tove Jansson, William Gaddis, and Uwe Johnson; tales of crime and punishment by Dorothy B. Hughes and Kenneth Fearing, among others; masterpieces of narrative history, literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, and memoirs from such writers as Eve Babitz, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Charles Simic; and unclassifiable classics on the order of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Join Zoom Meeting:

Everyone is warmly invited to join us for Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly and informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers—and the authors themselves will join us for a Q & A following our discussion. Lone Star Lit offers readers a chance to chat with local authors about their work and learn more about the writing process!

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book will be available via our online store or at Malvern Books. We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

For our December meeting, we’ll be discussing The Hunting Wives by May Cobb, and May will join us for part of the discussion.

“Gossipy, scandalous housewives behaving badly might make this the juiciest read of the season.” —Library Journal, starred review

The Hunting Wives share more than target practice, martinis, and bad behavior in this novel of obsession, seduction, and murder. Sophie O’Neill left behind an envy-inspiring career and the stressful, competitive life of big-city Chicago to settle down with her husband and young son in a small Texas town. It seems like the perfect life with a beautiful home in an idyllic rural community. But Sophie soon realizes that life is now too quiet, and she’s feeling bored and restless. Then she meets Margot Banks, an alluring socialite who is part of an elite clique secretly known as the Hunting Wives. Sophie finds herself completely drawn to Margot and swept into her mysterious world of late-night target practice and dangerous partying. As Sophie’s curiosity gives way to full-blown obsession, she slips farther away from the safety of her family and deeper into this nest of vipers. When the body of a teenage girl is discovered in the woods where the Hunting Wives meet, Sophie finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation and her life spiraling out of control.

May Cobb earned her MA in literature from San Francisco State University, and her essays and interviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Rumpus, Edible Austin, and Austin Monthly. Her previous novels are The Hunting Wives and My Summer Darlings. A Texas native, she lives in Austin with her family.

Join Zoom meeting:

Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. This month we’ll be concluding our discussion of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai.

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “season of book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. (Call us on 512-322-2097 if you’d prefer curbside pick up.) We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

“An elegant—and newly useful—meditation…As much as The Last Samurai is a novel about a mother’s struggle to raise a son on her own, it is also a novel about art—not making art, but consuming it and engaging with it in a million informal, inappropriate, but profoundly meaningful ways.” —Slate

Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t know: his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81699872386?pwd=d09BTjdoeTFaQVduV2hmWmNOWXRlQT09

Meeting ID: 816 9987 2386
Passcode: 183742

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “mystery book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. (Call us on 512-322-2097 if you’d prefer curbside pick up.) We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

December’s pick is Just Thieves by Gregory Galloway.

Rick and Frank are recovering addicts and accomplished house thieves. They do not steal randomly—they steal according to order, hired by a mysterious handler. The jobs run routinely until they’re tasked with taking a seemingly worthless trophy: an object that generates interest and obsession out of proportion to its apparent value.

Just as the robbery is completed, the two are involved in a freak car accident that sets off a chain of events and Frank disappears with the trophy. As Rick tries to find Frank, he is forced to confront his past, upending both his livelihood and his sense of reality. The narrative builds steadily into a powerful and shocking climax. Reveling in its con-artistry and double-crosses, Just Thieves is a nail-biting, noirish exploration of the working lives of two unforgettable crooks and the hidden forces that rule and ruin their lives.

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Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82699924942?pwd=OS82WFV2eGhoWDNpSGoreWcwSzRxdz09

Meeting ID: 826 9992 4942
Passcode: 054125