Malvern Books

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by A.R. Rogers.

This month’s featured reader is Raul Garza.

Raul Garza is a Latinx playwright who has drawn acclaim for telling stories that resound with authenticity and sense of place. He boldly explores the intersection of popular culture and cultural identity, and incorporates music, spirituality, and the power of nostalgia into works that span time and location. When not writing, Raul vibes on kundalini yoga, devours pop culture, and travels beyond his means.

Zoom Info:

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

Meeting ID: 867 7053 7623
Passcode: 035211

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the release of Emily Bludworth de Barrios’ Shopping, or The End of Time (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Emily will be joined by Laura Villareal.

“Marrying novelistic breadth and autobiographical intimacy, Shopping, or The End of Time invents a new poetic genre: the sociolyric. Impersonal and personal at once, these poems shift from collective to individual experience with dizzying rapidity. Their deft lines jump-cut across social experiences connected inequitably by a consumer culture thriving on violence against women and the Earth’s accelerating destruction. This is an innovative collection with impressive critical and emotional range.” —Brian Teare

Emily Bludworth de Barrios is a poet whose previous books and chapbooks include Women, Money, Children, Ghosts; Splendor; and Extraordinary Power. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Oxford Poetry, and Cincinnati Review. She was raised in Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, and now lives in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, with her husband and three children.

Laura Villareal is a 2019–21 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, a 2020–21 Stadler Fellow, and the author of the chapbook The Cartography of Sleep and the book Girl’s Guide to Leaving. She works on an interview series at F(r)iction called “Writers Talking about Anything but Writing.” Her work has appeared in AGNI, Grist, Black Warrior Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere.

Zoom Information:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86807901793?pwd=b0haUEdGUi9XWjB5REMwbHQ1WHFqUT09

Meeting ID: 868 0790 1793
Passcode: 535925

This event can also be viewed live on our YouTube channel.

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.

* * *

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:

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will 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.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by A.R. Rogers.

This month’s featured reader is Natalie Lima.

Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer from Las Vegas, NV and Hialeah, FL. Her essays and fiction have been published in Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Catapult, Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial, 2022), Body Language (Catapult, 2022), and elsewhere. Her writing has been honored in Best Small Fictions (2020), and noted twice in Best American Essays (2019 and 2020). She has received fellowships from PEN America Emerging Voices, Letras Boricus/the Mellon Foundation, Bread Loaf, Tin House, the VONA/Voices Workshop, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and a residency from Hedgebrook. Natalie teaches creative writing at Butler University as Assistant Professor in the Department of English. She is currently working on a memoir and an essay collection.

Zoom Info:

Join us via Zoom for a conversation between authors Martha Anne Toll and Devi Laskar. We’ll be celebrating the release of Martha Anne Toll’s new novel, Three Muses, and Devi Laskar also has a recent release, Circa.

Three Muses is a love story that enthralls; a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet. In post-WWII New York, John Curtin suffers lasting damage from having been forced to sing for the concentration camp kommandant who murdered his family. John trains to be a psychiatrist, struggling to wrest his life from his terror of music and his past. Katya Symanova climbs the arduous path to Prima Ballerina of the New York State Ballet, becoming enmeshed in an abusive relationship with her choreographer, who makes Katya a star but controls her life. When John receives a ticket to attend a ballet featuring Katya Symanova, a spell is cast. As John and Katya follow circuitous paths to one another, fear and promise rise in equal measure. Three muses—Song, Discipline, and Memory—weave their way through love and loss, heartbreak and triumph to leave readers of this prize-winning debut breathless.

Martha Anne Toll writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and reads anything that’s not nailed down. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Toll brings a long career in social justice to her work covering BIPOC and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, Pointe Magazine, The Millions, and elsewhere. She also publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets. Toll has recently joined the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of the 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South; winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature; and finalist for the Northern California Book awards. Her second novel, Circa was published May 3, 2022 by Mariner Books. Her third novel, Midnight, At The War will be published by Mariner in early 2024. She holds degrees from Columbia University, University of Illinois and UNC-CH. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family.

Join Zoom meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83949015855?pwd=UWtFbURLWnZFQ2lBc1FBN2pGMktjZz09

Meeting ID: 839 4901 5855
Passcode: 373231

This event can also be viewed live on our YouTube channel.

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

Meeting ID: 826 9992 4942
Passcode: 054125