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
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. 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 the store.
November’s selection is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them.
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.
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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81723625879?pwd=Z051Z1dySXpPOE4ySW1SUjVQOEFVdz09
Meeting ID: 817 2362 5879
Passcode: 888283
Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Fall 2021 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Sequoia Maner’s Little Girl Blue: Poems. Enjoy readings by Sequoia Maner and more. Full line up will be announced soon.
A handful of signed copies are available for curbside pick-up at the store. Unable to pick up at Malvern? Head over to Host Publications!
No need to register, this event will be live streaming at 7pm (central) through the Malvern Books YouTube page here: tinyurl.com/LGB-Launch.
Little Girl Blue: Poems is a collection of elegiac poems that conjures a tapestry of Black voices from history, the victims and the heroes who have helped us see ourselves and the world more truthfully. In these poems, we are not only called to witness injustice, but to hold space for what blooms from it: a confrontation full of exile and longing, an unshakable sense of joy that defies even death.
Sequoia Maner is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature at Spelman College. She is a co-editor of the critical-creative book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2020) and at work on a forthcoming book regarding Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly for the 33 1/3 series (Bloomsbury). Her writing has been published in Auburn Avenue, The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, and other venues.
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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
*** 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. 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 the store. ***
November’s pick is The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore.
When Wayétu Moore turns five years old, her father and grandmother throw her a big birthday party at their home in Monrovia, Liberia, but all she can think about is how much she misses her mother, who is working and studying in faraway New York. Before she gets the reunion her father promised her, war breaks out in Liberia. The family is forced to flee their home on foot, walking and hiding for three weeks until they arrive in the village of Lai. Finally, a rebel soldier smuggles them across the border to Sierra Leone, reuniting the family and setting them off on yet another journey, this time to the United States. Spanning this harrowing journey in Moore’s early childhood, her years adjusting to life in Texas as a black woman and an immigrant, and her eventual return to Liberia, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is a deeply moving story of the search for home in the midst of upheaval. Moore has a novelist’s eye for suspense and emotional depth, and this unforgettable memoir is full of imaginative, lyrical flights and lush prose. In capturing both the hazy magic and the stark realities of what is becoming an increasingly pervasive experience, Moore shines a light on the great political and personal forces that continue to affect many migrants around the world, and calls us all to acknowledge the tenacious power of love and family.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86310677543?pwd=NFZHOTF5R2xpWEU2MVRvNW5IVS8wZz09
Meeting ID: 863 1067 7543
Passcode: 850128
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!)
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 or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store.
For our November meeting, we’ll be discussing Fantastic Americana: Stories by Josh Rountree.
Travel an American landscape of endless highways, video stores that never close, and lonesome cabins stalked by nightmares. Josh Rountree’s second collection gathers fifteen years of stories, including two originals never before published.
“Josh Rountree is that rarest of creatures, a natural born storyteller. His collection Fantastic Americana: Stories is a total delight, drawing on the myths, the legends, and the music of this land, and weaving them into stories that are uniquely his own. Highly recommended.” —Jaime Lee Moyer, author of Divine Heretic and Brightfall
Josh Rountree writes horror, fantasy, science fiction, and whatever else sounds good at the time. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Realms of Fantasy, Bourbon Penn, PseudoPod, PodCastle, Daily Science Fiction, and A Punk Rock Future. His new short fiction collection, Fantastic Americana: Stories, is available from Fairwood Press. Josh lives in Texas and tweets about records, books, and guitars @josh_rountree.
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Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88216588365?pwd=d2dDa1pjUXY3ZVlXaXB5NStTWm1CQT09
Meeting ID: 882 1658 8365
Passcode: 683160
Join us via Zoom for a reading with Awst Press, featuring authors Donald Quist, Andrew Yoon, and Esteban Rodríguez.
Donald Quist will be reading from a new book of essays, To Those Bounded. Andrew Yoon’s poetry collection We Are Invited to Climb, part of Awst’s “pocket book” collection, came out in September. And local author Esteban Rodriguez recently published a debut essay collection called Before the Earth Devours Us.
Donald Quist is author of Harbors, a Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner and International Book Awards Finalist. He has a linked story collection, For Other Ghosts. His writing has appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and was Notable in Best American Essays 2018. He is creator of the online nonfiction series PAST TEN. Donald has received fellowships from Sundress Academy for the Arts, Kimbilio Fiction, and served as a Gus T. Ridgel fellow for the English PhD program at University of Missouri. He is Director of the MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Andrew Yoon is a New York-based Korean-American artist involved in music, poetry, and computers. Lately he is writing poems that change, making music with paint and dance, live-coding sounds, and leading the Melodica Drone and Bach Orchestra. He is the founder of the arts journal and small press Nothing to Say. As a free culture advocate everything he makes is under copyleft licenses, including this collection.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He currently lives in central Texas.
Zoom Information:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82288354224?pwd=L2ttY3VkOXVKenV4SlRpRTk5S09tZz09
Meeting ID: 822 8835 4224
Passcode: 186776
Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Leticia Urieta’s Las Criaturas. With readings from Leticia Urieta and Sueitko Zamorano-Chavez.
Las Criaturas is a hybrid collection that blends poetic and speculative narrative forms to tell stories of untold women. The poems and short stories play with traditional storytelling forms and tales to ruminate on the monstrous, unruly, vulnerable, strength and beauty in the feminine and seek to reclaim people’s power in powerless situations. The book is broken into three sections to show the multifaceted nature of the word “criatura.” In the story, “The Monster” a child in a migrant detention center is haunted by a monster made of her own fear. In “La Mujer Alacran,” a woman who is sexually assaulted transforms into a literal “scorpion woman” in order to protect herself. In “The Inbetween Mother,” a daughter attempts to reunite her selkie mother with her true form.
Leticia Urieta (she/her/hers) is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a teaching artist in the greater Austin community and a freelance writer. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets, Lumina, The Offing, Kweli Journal, Medium, Electric Lit and others. Her chapbook, The Monster, is out now from LibroMobile Press and her hybrid collection, Las Criaturas, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.
Zoom Info:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83908808756?pwd=bTcwVkRNSjBGZFhjeXJHMndZNlpsQT09
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 the work of Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer Clarice Lispector. November’s novel is Água Viva.
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 book club” 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 the store.
A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.
“This is a fictional account of a woman’s attempt to escape from conventional time and exist instead in a perpetually renewing ‘this instant-now.’ Lispector pursued this same seemingly impossible aim through a number of books—getting closer and closer to the confused and thrilling feeling of fully conscious aliveness. Água Viva is where she succeeds most amazingly.” —Toby Litt, The Guardian
Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83059531438?pwd=Z1FjNExRRjIwWW0vQk1OS3B6cncwZz09
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 Host Publications, or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit.
This month’s pick is Poems by Uszula Kozioł.
Using words, expressions, images, and sounds from a variety of sources—popular magic, songs heard in her childhood, the music of Bach, everyday conversations and works of great philosophers—Uszula Kozioł established herself as one of the most important voices in Polish poetry. In an idiom similar to Paul Celan, Kozioł takes the reader into diverse and unique topics from the world of a snowflake to the life of Circe. She is a poet with the fine sensibility of our time who has embarked on the quest for the knowledge of reality, and comments on all aspects of that reality, including the precariousness of life, relationships, and humankind’s survival with intensity and intelligence. A bilingual collection every serious student of 20th-century poetry should have on their shelf.
Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89009825973?pwd=cFRIQ0p1Wk1UcFJVaFVnMWdHYjB2QT09
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, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or for an appointment to visit.
November’s title is Apocalypse Baby by Virginie Despentes, translated by Sian Reynolds.
Apocalypse Baby is a smart, fast-paced mystery about a missing adolescent girl traveling through Paris and Barcelona. She is tailed by two mismatched private investigators: the Hyena, part ruthless interrogator, part oversexed rock star, and Lucie, her plain and passive—almost to the point of invisible—sidekick. As their desperate search unfolds, they interrogate a suspicious cast of characters, and the dark heart of contemporary youth culture is exposed.
“Despentes explores deeply flawed but interesting characters; the limits of traditional female roles; the ravages of the European class system; the challenge of Internet control; and the destructive self-indulgence of a youth culture that lacks its own deeply held beliefs and is, as such, easily manipulated by the darkest authority.” —Kirkus
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86049977279?pwd=YTQ5SzJ5amJHaGliTHVmTkdWeWthUT09
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. 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 selection is Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson.
In Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, a team of workers has been given the job of digging the foundation of an immense edifice, a palatial home for the perfect future that, they are convinced, is at hand. But the harder the team works, the deeper they dig, the more things go wrong, and it becomes clear that what is being dug is not a foundation but an immense grave. The Foundation Pit is Platonov’s most overtly political book, written in direct response to the staggering brutalities of Stalin’s collectivization of Russian agriculture. It is also a literary masterpiece. Seeking to evoke unspeakable realities, Platonov deforms and transforms language in pages that echo both with the alienating doublespeak of power and the stark simplicity of prayer. This English translation is the first and only one to be based on the definitive edition published by Pushkin House in Moscow. It includes extensive notes and, in an appendix, several striking passages deleted by Platonov. Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson’s afterword discusses the historical context and style of Platonov’s most haunted and troubling work.
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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81221170204?pwd=MUhCWk01WHBqeWRzdFpCbW1VYU9WZz09
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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
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. 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 A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.
On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own. Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86416490618?pwd=eUZFZFV4ci8rZ3pWUWpXV0Y3L2JCZz09
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!)
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 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.
For our December meeting, we’ll be discussing Ghost Daughter by Helen Currie Foster, and the author will be joining us for part of the discussion!
When lawyer Alice MacDonald Greer finds the dead body of her friend and client Ellie Windom at the foot of a staircase, a terrorized horse dancing nearby, she knows trouble’s coming. Serving as executor for her friend’s will means grappling with Ellie’s explosive secrets: a long-lost daughter unknown to her feuding sons and a long-ago lover with enemies of his own.
Alice quickly discovers her friend had a treasure trove of hidden art with questionable history, and the vultures begin to circle. Intruders, carjackers, and greedy heirs all want a seat at the feast. Join Alice as she tries to dodge danger and uncover the murderous truth in a race across Texas and New Mexico (with occasional stops for barbecue).
Award-winning author Helen Currie Foster lives and writes north of Dripping Springs, Texas, in the beloved Hill Country, supervised by three burros. She’s deeply curious about human history and prehistory and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. In her Alice MacDonald Greer mystery novels, small town lawyer Alice must unravel a murder with its roots in the past.
Helen earned a BA from Wellesley College, an MA from the University of Texas, and a JD from the University of Michigan, where she grew fascinated with dirt and water law. After practicing environmental and regulatory litigation for thirty years, she found the character Alice had suddenly appeared. Helen’s active with Austin Shakespeare and Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime, and a member of the Hays County Master Naturalists, still trying to learn her native grasses.
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Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81345731056?pwd=a3NKZ1kvOFVBcEF3NG9zM1hRZno2Zz09
For over twenty years, the Austin reading for the Texas Poetry Calendar has been the culmination of the fall calendar readings for Texas’ most iconic poets. 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!
Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87611534672?pwd=QjhlS0R0RlZOOFRGS2VsRFhaOUFFZz09
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 the work of twentieth-century Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Muriel Spark. December’s novel is The Ballad of Peckham Rye.
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 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.
“Touched with a Satanic glamour, witty and quite perfect in its construction, this light and mock-folkloric novel is the work of an inspired satirist.” —Publishers Weekly
“A jet-black comedy—a wonderful morality tale.” —Bookslut
The Ballad of Peckham Rye is the wickedly farcical tale of an English factory turned upside-down by a Scot who may or may not be in league with the Devil. Hired to do “human research” into the lives of the workers, Dougal Douglas stirs up mayhem.
Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific poet, short story writer, essayist, and novelist. She was best known for the satire and artistry of her audacious fictions (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, and The Comforters amongst them). Spark was educated in Edinburgh and later spent some years in Rhodesia. She returned to Great Britain during World War II and wrote propaganda for the Foreign Office. She served as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review from 1947–49. She received numerous awards for her writing, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965, and became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82652318881?pwd=bTkyQ0RqM0o0NlZHMktRZGg3V2dKQT09
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 becky@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 title is Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes.
Sailor used to be Senator Willis Douglass’ protege. When he met the lawmaker, he was just a poor kid, living on the Chicago streets. Douglass took him in, put him through school, and groomed him to work as a confidential secretary. And as the senator’s dealings became increasingly corrupt, he knew he could count on Sailor to clean up his messes. Willis Douglass isn’t a senator anymore; he left Chicago, Sailor, and a murder rap behind and set out for the sunny streets of Santa Fe. Now, unwilling to take the fall for another man’s crime, Sailor has set out for New Mexico as well, with blackmail and revenge on his mind. But there’s another man on his trail as well—a cop who wants the ex-senator for more than a payoff. In the midst of a city gone mad, bursting with wild crowds for a yearly carnival, the three men will violently converge. The suspenseful tale that inspired one of the most beloved films noir of all time, Ride the Pink Horse is a tour-de-force that confirms Dorothy B. Hughes’ status as a master of the mid-century crime novel.
Join Zoom Meeting:
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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. 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.
January’s selection is Storm by George R. Stewart.
With Storm, first published in 1941, George R. Stewart invented a new genre of fiction: the eco-novel. California has been plunged into drought throughout the summer and fall when a ship reports an unusual barometric reading from the far western Pacific. In San Francisco, a junior meteorologist in the Weather Bureau takes note of the anomaly and plots “an incipient little whorl” on the weather map, a developing storm, he suspects, that he privately dubs Maria. Stewart’s novel tracks Maria’s progress to and beyond the shores of the United States through the eyes of meteorologists, linemen, snowplow operators, a general, a couple of decamping lovebirds, and an unlucky owl, and the storm, surging and ebbing, will bring long-needed rain, flooded roads, deep snows, accidents, and death. Storm is an epic account of humanity’s relationship to and dependence on the natural world.
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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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!)
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 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.
For our January meeting, we’ll be discussing Ghosts of Yokosuka by Britta Jensen, and the author will be joining us for part of the discussion!
From the award-winning author of the Eloia Born series, comes a new novella about identity, finding oneself in the midst of wandering spirits, and young love in a Japanese port city. Fourteen-year-old Annabelle’s only friends are ghosts. To make matters worse, her Japanese birth father left her family two years ago and her mother has recently remarried an American sailor. Her already difficult life on the backstreets of 1980s Yokosuka, Japan, has gotten a lot more complicated as she tries to navigate the complicated social strata between the Filipino, American, and Japanese cultures on the small naval base. When a motherless boy drifts into her world, her life changes in unexpected ways. The shifting weight of the adult responsibilities she has shouldered for far too long makes her question if life with only her ghosts caring for her is enough?
Britta Jensen’s debut YA novel Eloia Born won the 2019 Writer’s League of Texas YA Discovery Prize and was long-listed for the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. The sequel, Hirana’s War, was released in October 2020. Many of Britta’s stories explore themes of persevering through disability, parental separation, and the intersection of various cultures on new worlds. Her stories have been shortlisted for the 2017 Henshaw Press and Fiction Factory prizes and she was published in Stories for Homes, Volume 2. Britta’s plays have been performed in New York City, Japan, and South Korea. She earned a BA in Acting Performance from Fordham University and an MA in Teaching of English Literature from Columbia University. For the past seventeen years she has taught creative writing and edited books for both traditional and indie authors. She has received numerous awards, including the General Sharp Award from the US Army, for her innovative teaching of creative writing in New York City, South Korea, and Germany. Friends often refer to her as a polyglot—which is a product of living twenty-two years overseas in Japan, South Korea, and Germany, before settling in Austin, Texas. She enjoys mentoring writers and editing books with The Writing Consultancy and Yellowbird Editors. In her spare time she dances Argentine Tango, sings, and volunteers with the Relief Society, SCBWI, and the Writer’s League of Texas.
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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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
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. 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.
January’s pick is The Living is Easy by Dorothy West.
The first novel by Dorothy West—author of The Wedding and the youngest writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance—was one of only a handful to be published by black women during the 1940s. The Living Is Easy tells the story of Cleo Judson, daughter of Southern sharecroppers, determined to integrate into Boston’s black elite. Married to the “Black Banana King” Bart Judson, Cleo maneuvers her three sisters and their children—but not their husbands—into living with her, attempting to recreate her original family in a Bostonian mansion.
Written in elegant and piercing prose, The Living Is Easy is a classic of American literature by a groundbreaking African American woman writer whose work deserves widespread and enduring recognition.
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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 the work of twentieth-century Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Muriel Spark. January’s novel is A Far Cry from Kensington.
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 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.
Nancy Hawkins, the majestic narrator of A Far Cry From Kensington, takes us by the hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London, where she spent her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher (“of very good books”) and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington boarding house. She found evil everywhere: shady literary doings and a deadly enemy; anonymous letters; blackmail; and suicide. Looking back on those years from her new perch in Italy, Mrs. Hawkins recounts how that time changed her life forever.
Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific poet, short story writer, essayist, and novelist. She was best known for the satire and artistry of her audacious fictions (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, and The Comforters amongst them). Spark was educated in Edinburgh and later spent some years in Rhodesia. She returned to Great Britain during World War II and wrote propaganda for the Foreign Office. She served as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review from 1947–49. She received numerous awards for her writing, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965, and became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.
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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 virtually 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 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.
January’s title is Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris.
Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world’s most cherished pastimes: Gardening! As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris’s poems map the garden as body and the body as garden—her words at home in the phytological and anatomical—like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky’s “80 Flowers.” In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation—spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.
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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 becky@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.
January’s title is Percival Everett’s The Trees. (Please note, this book contains some strong racial language.)
Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.
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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of two poetry collections from John Sibley Williams: The Drowning House, winner of The Elixir Press Poetry Award, and Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, winner of The Cider Press Review Book Award. With guests Chloe Martinez and Esteban Rodriguez.
“In The Drowning House, John Sibley Williams grapples with ghosts, the predators outside and in, those closer than our own hearts. In American landscapes haunted by nooses and wolves, burning crosses and floods, Williams holds a light before his path. These are keen-edged poems, kneeling before us, asking forgiveness for what our ancestors have done and have had to live through. He offers himself as a sacrifice for our sins: ‘here, love, is the tree of my body // to learn to climb. Far from here. From me. To touch / whatever’s still up there, beautifully above us.'” —Philip Metres
“With an impressive mastery of sound matched only by his alchemical imagery, Williams guides readers along mythic highways, above oceans, and towards the reimagining of a bridge no one remembers. To conjure is a recurring theme in this impressive collection—as if language holds the power to reconfigure a past, a mother, a child. And perhaps it can. Williams’ words are that convincing. Recasting home as conch shell, as ghost house, and as fire, we learn that we are held together by the tensile strength of our own narrative. I’ve circled and underlined lines on nearly every poem in Scale Model of a Country at Dawn. This is a book you’ll want to read, and then turn to the first poem to enter again. Even if no one is safe from the wolves in our hearts, John Sibley Williams helps us live within these contradictions.” —Susan Rich
John Sibley Williams is the author of four award-winning poetry collections: The Drowning House, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, As One Fire Consumes Another, and Skin Memory. A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of Caesura Poetry Workshop.
Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Common, Shenandoah and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He currently lives in central Texas.
Zoom Information:
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Meeting ID: 876 7501 4021
Passcode: 817232
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. 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.
February’s selection is Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, in a new translation from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie.
Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.
Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.
Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
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.
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Join us in celebrating Kallisto Gaia Press’ joint release of two new chapbooks: How to Identify Yourself with a Wound by Austin poet KB, winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize; and a new collection, Motherboard, from a Saguaro Poetry Prize finalist, Vermont poet Renee Rossi.
“The poems in How to Identify Yourself with a Wound pull no punches. Raw honesty paired with concise language inhabit and fully embody a life shaped by the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender. This is my favorite kind of poetry, necessary and urgent, revealing and saving and healing and re-creating both poet and reader.” —ire’ne lara silva, judge, 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize
KB is a Black queer nonbinary miracle. They are the author of HOW TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF WITH A WOUND (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) and Freedom House (Deep Vellum, 2023). KB is a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow and has words published in Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere.
“Motherboard possesses a compelling voice that moves you from awe at the abundant beauty of the natural world and transcendent life moments to a strange fear of how vulnerable our happinesses are, how changeable the world is. And yet, the poet’s voice is sure and strong, negotiating the changing terrain of our lives.” —ire’ne lara silva, judge, 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize
Renée Rossi has published the full-length poetry collection, TRIAGE, and two chapbooks: THIRD Worlds and STILL LIFE, winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize. A native of Detroit, she currently divides her time between the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and other places that she finds compelling.
Zoom Information:
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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
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. 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.
February’s pick is Shock Treatment: Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition by Karen Finley.
“Finley’s Shock Treatment is more than just ‘art.’ It remains a searing and necessary indictment of America, a call to arms, a great protest against the injustices waged on queers and women during a time in recent American history where government intervention and recognition was so desperately needed. Twenty-five years on, Finley’s work continues to shock and provoke readers and audiences, demonstrating the powerful cultural and political impact her work has had on modern American art and performance art.” —Nathan Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Karen Finley is an iconoclast who, ironically, became an icon when her work in Shock Treatment was targeted by right wing politicians. This important book is as necessary and vital today as it was twenty-five years ago.” –Sapphire, author of Push
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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 becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” 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.
For our February meeting, we’ll be discussing Ursula Pike’s An Indian Among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir, and Ursula will be joining us for part of the discussion!
When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, “knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.” In the following two years, as a series of dramatic episodes brought that tension to boiling point, she began to ask: what does it mean to have experienced the effects of colonialism firsthand, and yet to risk becoming a colonizing force in turn?
An Indian among los Indígenas, Pike’s memoir of this experience, upends a canon of travel memoirs that has historically been dominated by white writers. It is a sharp, honest, and unnerving examination of the shadows that colonial history casts over even the most well-intentioned attempts at cross-cultural aid. It is also the debut of an exceptionally astute writer with a mastery of deadpan wit. It signals a shift in travel writing that is long overdue.
Ursula Pike is the author of An Indian among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir (2021) from Heyday Books. Ursula lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches creative writing at Austin Community College. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a member of the Karuk Tribe. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Yellow Medicine Review, Ligeia Magazine, World Literature Today, and KUT radio’s O’Dark 30.
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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 the work of twentieth-century Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Muriel Spark. February’s novel is Memento Mori.
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 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.
Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age.
In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled, and many an old unsavory secret is dusted off.
“This funny and macabre book has delighted me as much as any novel that I have read since the war.” —Graham Greene
“Acidly funny: a marvelously crafted, tautly written novel.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific poet, short story writer, essayist, and novelist. She was best known for the satire and artistry of her audacious fictions (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, and The Comforters amongst them). Spark was educated in Edinburgh and later spent some years in Rhodesia. She returned to Great Britain during World War II and wrote propaganda for the Foreign Office. She served as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review from 1947–49. She received numerous awards for her writing, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965, and became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.
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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 becky@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.
February’s title is The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell.
Named a Library Reads Pick, Apple Books’ Best Book, Powells’ Pick, Amazon Fiction & Literature’s “Best of the Month,” The Millions’ Top Ten Book of the Month, and one of CrimeReads’ and Oprah Daily’s Best Historical Novels of 2021
London, 1893: high up in a house on a dark, snowy night, a lone seamstress stands by a window. So begins the swirling, serpentine world of Paraic O’Donnell’s Victorian-inspired mystery, the story of a city cloaked in shadow, but burning with questions: why does the seamstress jump from the window? Why is a cryptic message stitched into her skin? And how is she connected to a rash of missing girls, all of whom seem to have disappeared under similar circumstances?
On the case is Inspector Cutter, a detective as sharp and committed to his work as he is wryly hilarious. Gideon Bliss, a Cambridge dropout in love with one of the missing girls, stumbles into a role as Cutter’s sidekick. And clever young journalist Octavia Hillingdon sees the case as a chance to tell a story that matters—despite her employer’s preference that she stick to a women’s society column. As Inspector Cutter peels back the mystery layer by layer, he leads them all, at last, to the secrets that lie hidden at the house on Vesper Sands.
By turns smart, surprising, and impossible to put down, The House on Vesper Sands offers a glimpse into the strange undertow of late nineteenth-century London and the secrets we all hold inside us.
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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 virtually 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 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.
February’s title is The Selected Poems of Silvina Ocampo, in a new translation from the Spanish by Jason Weiss.
Silvina Ocampo possessed her own special enchantment as a poet, and only now is her extraordinary poetic achievement becoming more widely recognized beyond Latin America.
Remarkably, this is the first collection of Ocampo’s poetry to appear in English. From her early sonnets on the native Argentine landscape, to her meditations on love’s travails, to her explorations of the kinship between plant and animal realms, to her clairvoyant inquiries into history and myth and memory, readers will find the full range of Ocampo’s “metaphysical lyricism” (The Independent) represented in this groundbreaking edition.
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Passcode: 818299
Join us via Zoom to celebrate the Austin launch of E.C. Belli’s second collection, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep (Anhinga Press), winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. With readings from E.C. Belli, Sam Ross, Safiya Sinclair, and Diana Khoi Nguyen.
“When Sappho was asked to define beauty, she answered ‘Some people say it’s a herd of black horses in the grass, some people say it’s a fleet of warships leaving the harbor. I say beauty is whatever you love.’ Reading E.C. Belli’s sensational A Sleep That is Not Our Sleep, I kept thinking of that bit of Sappho, thinking of Belli’s remarkable affinity for rendering with precision and acuity what is beloved, what is lovable, and what is unloved but worthy of it. One page reads, in its entirety, ‘little clavicle bone, you grew // things grow well in me.’ The verse odes the beauty of a bone, yes, but also the beauty of a self capable of growing and sustaining what it’s made. In this collection, stones whisper in the night, eyes mend into dials. The poem ‘Hues’ is worth the sticker price alone. To say it simply: Belli has written a singular collection, one I’ll be learning from for years.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell
E.C. Belli is a bilingual poet and translator. Her second book, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep, was selected by Cathy Park Hong to be winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry (Anhinga Press, 2022). Her debut collection of poems, Objects of Hunger, is winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019). Her translation of I, Little Asylum, a short novel by Emmanuelle Guattari, was released by Semiotext(e) for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and The Nothing Bird, her translation of some selected poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd, appeared with Oberlin College Press (2013). She is the recipient of a 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and her work has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, AGNI, and FIELD. Work in French has appeared in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle and PO&SIE (France), among others. She is the author of the chapbook plein jeu.
Sam Ross is the author of Company, winner of the Four Way Book Levis Prize in Poetry and the 2020 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Tin House, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and other publications, and he has received support from Columbia University School of the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is also a painter.
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK. Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Civitella Rainieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her memoir, How to Say Babylon, is forthcoming in 2023 from Simon & Schuster.
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. This spring 2022, she is an artist-in-residence at Brown University.
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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Maria Wells’ Images in the Clouds: Reading the Sky.
“These poems have personal integrity and are both deeply felt and clearly voiced, always welcome in any art.” —Kurt Heinzelman, Professor Emeritus of Poetry and Poetics, The University of Texas at Austin
A combination of sixty poems and ten color illustrations, Images in the Clouds carries the reader forward and back in time, to inner and outer worlds. Taken from Wells’ treasure trunk of a life of adventure and world travel, some verses share memories of places and people, while some delight with pure fantasy and imagination.
A Fulbright Scholar and Doctoral graduate from the University of Pisa, Maria Xenia Wells Zevelechi spent her career at the University of Texas at Austin. After retiring from academia, she embraced poetry. Inspired by a friend’s painting, her first poem was “Memories in Silver,” written in Paris, at a meeting of Poets and Writers. A member of the Austin Poetry Society, she gives readings in Austin, Paris, and Greece. Her civic and cultural participation has included an active role in the Sierra Club, President of the Board of Director of Salon Concerts, member of the Fundraiser and Scholarship Committee for Zonta International Association of Business and Professional Women, and member of the Leadership Circle of Austin PBS. With two daughters, five grandchildren, and the memory of a loving husband, she lives in Austin, Texas.
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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. 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.
March’s selection is The Silentiary by Antonio di Benedetto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen.
The Silentiary takes place in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s. A young man employed in middle management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary precondition, which the crowded and noisily industrialized city always denies him, however often he and his mother and wife move in search of it. He thinks of embarking on his writing career with something simple, a detective novel, and ponders the possibility of choosing a victim among the people he knows and planning a crime as if he himself were the killer. That way, he hopes, his book might finally begin to take shape.
The Silentiary, along with Zama and The Suicides, is one of the three thematically linked novels by Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation, after the dedication “To the victims of expectation” in Zama. Together they constitute, in Juan José Saer’s words, “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish.”
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.
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Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Spring 2022 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Maryan Nagy Captan’s Sixteen Rabbits. Enjoy readings by Brittanie Sterner, Gabrielle Grace Hogan, Rob Colgate, Molly Williams, and Maryan Nagy Captan.
No need to register, this event will be live streaming at 7pm (central) through the Malvern Books YouTube page: https://tinyurl.com/SixteenRabbitsLaunch.
Sixteen Rabbits transports us through dream, memory, place and time, by opening portals that exist in the liminal space between two worlds. These meditative journeys spring from a deep nostalgia, and one of the most urgent expressions of longing in Captan’s work is that of the displaced, yearning for home. Through displacement, religious persecution, and trauma, these poems come shimmering forth ‘in full-bodied reverie,’ seeking divine wisdom which echoes throughout Sixteen Rabbits like a summons to see this moment, this place, this life in all of its enchantment. As Captan writes: ‘reverence, / I am writing with reverence.’
Maryan Nagy Captan is a poet, screenwriter, gardener, and birder living in Austin, TX. She is an alumnus of The Michener Center for Writers and the Disquiet International Literary Program.
Order a copy of Sixteen Rabbits by Maryan Nagy Captan here: https://hostpublications.com/products/sixteen-rabbits
Join us via Zoom to celebrate the release of Tomás Q. Morín’s new memoir, Let Me Count the Ways. Laura Marris, translator of the new edition of Camus’ The Plague—the first new translation of The Plague to be published in the United States in more than seventy years—will join as well.
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.
Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Yale Review, The Believer, The Point, and elsewhere. Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget, and To Live Is to Resist, a biography of Antonio Gramsci. With Alice Kaplan, she is the co-author of States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (forthcoming in fall 2022). She is currently at work on her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, which will be published by Graywolf in 2024.
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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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
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. 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.
March’s pick is The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez.
This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who shares the blood by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story.
“The Gilda Stories was ahead of its time when it was first published in 1991, and this anniversary edition reminds us why it’s still an important novel. Gomez’s characters are rooted in historical reality yet lift seductively out of it, to trouble traditional models of family, identity, and literary genre and imagine for us bold new patterns. A lush, exciting, inspiring read.” —Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet
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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 becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” 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.
For our March meeting, we’ll be discussing Hole in the Middle by Kendra Fortmeyer, who will join us for part of the discussion!
Morgan Stone was born with a hole in her middle: a perfectly smooth, sealed, fist-sized chunk of nothing near her belly button. After seventeen years of hiding behind lumpy sweaters and a smart mouth, she decides to bare all. At first she feels liberated… until a few online photos snowball into a media frenzy. Now Morgan is desperate to return to her own strange version of normal—when only her doctors, her divorced parents, and her best friend, Caro, knew the truth.
Then a new doctor appears with a boy who may be both Morgan’s cure and her destiny. But what happens when you meet the person who is—literally–your perfect match? Is being whole really all it’s cracked up to be?
For every reader who grew up loving R.J. Palacio’s Wonder comes a hilarious, heartbreaking, and magical YA debut about what it means to accept the body you’re given.
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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 the work of twentieth-century Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Muriel Spark. March’s novel, our final Spark pick, is The Driver’s Seat.
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 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.
The Driver’s Seat, Spark’s own favorite among her many novels, was hailed by the New Yorker as “her spiny and treacherous masterpiece.”
Driven mad by an office job, Lise leaves everything and flies south on holiday in search of passionate adventure. In this metaphysical shocker, infinity and eternity attend Lise’s last terrible day in the unnamed southern city that is her final destination…
“A masterpiece. No one could read it and mistake its force. Only Muriel Spark would have dreamed of writing it. The book’s near-jaunty tone would, in some fictional universes, be at odds with its jet-black content. In Spark-world, they go together, like murderer and victim.”
—John Lanchester
Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific poet, short story writer, essayist, and novelist. She was best known for the satire and artistry of her audacious fictions (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, and The Comforters amongst them). Spark was educated in Edinburgh and later spent some years in Rhodesia. She returned to Great Britain during World War II and wrote propaganda for the Foreign Office. She served as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review from 1947–49. She received numerous awards for her writing, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965, and became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.
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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 becky@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.
March’s title is Allmen and the Dragonflies by Martin Suter.
A thrilling art heist escapade infused with European high culture and luxury that doesn’t shy away from the darker side of human nature.
Johann Friedrich von Allmen, a bon vivant of dandified refinement, has exhausted his family fortune by living in Old World grandeur despite present-day financial constraints. Forced to downscale, Allmen inhabits the garden house of his former Zurich estate, attended by his Guatemalan butler, Carlos. When not reading novels by Balzac and Somerset Maugham, he plays jazz on a Bechstein baby grand. Allmen’s fortunes take a sharp turn when he meets a stunning blonde whose lakeside villa contains five Art Nouveau bowls created by renowned French artist Émile Gallé and decorated with a dragonfly motif. Allmen, pressured to pay off mounting debts, absconds with the priceless bowls and embarks on a high-risk, potentially violent bid to cash them in. This is the first of a series of humorous, fast-paced detective novels devoted to a memorable gentleman thief who, with his trusted sidekick Carlos, creates an investigative firm to recover missing precious objects.
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We’re taking a break from our poetry book club for a few months. We hope to reimagine the club in an effort to broaden its appeal to both those new to poetry as well as long-time poetry readers. We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as we resume Line/Break!
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. 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.
April’s selection is A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov, in a new translation from the Russian by Alexander Boguslawski.
By turns lyrical and philosophical, witty and baffling, A School for Fools confounds all expectations of the novel. Here we find not one reliable narrator but two “unreliable” narrators: the young man who is a student at the “school for fools” and his double. What begins as a reverie (with frequent interruptions) comes to seem a sort of fairy-tale quest not for gold or marriage but for self-knowledge. The currents of consciousness running through the novel are passionate and profound. Memories of childhood summers at the dacha are contemporaneous with the present, the dead are alive, and the beloved is present in the wind. Here is a tale either of madness or of the life of the imagination in conversation with reason, straining at the limits of language; in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, “an enchanting, tragic, and touching 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.
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Passcode: 988346
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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
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. 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.
April’s pick is Girls Against God by Jenny Hval.
A genre-warping, time-travelling horror novel-slash-feminist manifesto for fans of Clarice Lispector and Jeanette Winterson.
Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her work, things start stirring themselves up. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic.
Jenny Hval’s latest novel is a radical fusion of queer feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, writing and art.
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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 becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” 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.
For our April meeting, we’ll be discussing Richard Z. Santos’ Trust Me, and Richard will join us for part of the discussion.
Charles O’Connell is riding an epic losing streak. Having worked in politics since college, he is used to losing races, but he never imagined that his most recent candidate would end up in jail and that he would also need an attorney. His euphoria at not joining his boss in prison is short-lived—no one will hire him now, his credit cards are maxed out, and his marriage is on the rocks. An unexpected offer to work in Santa Fe doing public relations for a firm building the city’s new airport feels like an opportunity to start fresh and make connections with powerful people out west. But when the construction crew unearths a skeleton, Charles’ fresh start turns into another disaster. Soon, a group of Apache claims that the site holds Geronimo’s secret grave, and Charles realizes everyone has an agenda. Gabriel Luna, one of the laborers present when the skeleton is unearthed, is willing to do just about anything to reconnect with his teenage son. Cody Branch, an ambitious, powerful millionaire, plans to leverage the deal to enrich himself. And there’s his wife, Olivia Branch, who has a surprising connection to Charles’ past and desperately needs his help. Surrounded by deception on all fronts, including his own lies to himself and his wife, Charles falls into a whirlwind of fraud, betrayal, and double crosses. This riveting novel barrels through the New Mexican landscape in an exploration of innocence and guilt, power and wealth, and the search for love and happiness.
Richard Z. Santos’ debut novel, Trust Me, was a finalist for the Writer’s League of Texas Book Awards and was named one of the best debuts of the year by Crime Reads. He is currently editing a collection of horror stories for Arte Público Press. He is the Executive Director of Austin Bat Cave, an organization that provides creative writing workshops to students in under-resourced areas. He is a former Board Member of The National Book Critics Circle and has judged contests for The Kirkus Prize, The NEA, The International Thriller Writers Association, The Texas Book Festival and many more. Recent work can be found in Texas Monthly, Awst Press, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads, and Salt Hill. 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 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 the work of Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist Roberto Bolaño. April’s title is Nazi Literature in the Americas, translated by Chris Andrews.
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 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.
Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño’s books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.
Born in Santiago, Chile, Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968. He went back to Chile in 1973 to “help build socialism” (as he wrote in his story “Dance Card”), but less than a month after his return Pinochet seized power. Bolaño was arrested and imprisoned in Concepción. After his release, he returned to Mexico before moving to Paris and then on to Barcelona. Bolaño has been acclaimed as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag), “a spellbinder” (Newsweek), and “never less than mesmerizing” (Los Angeles Times). Winner of many prizes, including the Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, Bolaño wrote ten novels, two collections of short stories and five books of poetry before he died at the age of 50, on July 15, 2003.
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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 becky@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.
April’s title is Waltz Into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich.
When New Orleans coffee merchant Louis Durand first meets his bride-to-be after a months-long courtship by mail, he’s shocked that she doesn’t match the photographs sent with her correspondence. But Durand has told his own fibs, concealing from her the details of his wealth, and so he mostly feels fortunate to find her so much more beautiful than expected. Soon after they marry, however, he becomes increasingly convinced that the woman in his life is not the same woman with whom he exchanged letters, a fact that becomes unavoidable when she suddenly disappears with his fortune. Alone, desperate, and inexplicably love-sick, Louis quickly descends into madness, obsessed with finding Julia and bringing her to justice—and simply with seeing her again. He engages the services of a private detective to do so, embarking on a search that spans the southeast of the country. When he finally tracks her down, the nightmare truly begins…
A dark tale of the destructive power of love, Waltz into Darkness is a classic “femme fatale” narrative that shows “the father of the modern suspense story” (LA Times) at the top of his unsettling craft. It has been adapted for film twice, most notably serving as the basis for Francois Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid.
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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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
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. 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.
May’s pick is Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair.
Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.
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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. 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.
May’s selection is Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin.
Named by The Guardian as one of the Top 100 Books of All Time, this is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic. Berlin Alexanderplatz is gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. In Michael Hofmann’s extraordinary new translation, Döblin’s masterpiece lives in English for the first time.
“A raging cataract of a novel, one that threatens to engulf the reader in a tumult of sensation. It has long been considered the behemoth of German literary modernism, the counterpart to Ulysses.”
—Alex Ross, The New Yorker“A classic German novel of the criminal demimonde of the Weimar era … Hofmann’s version is vigorous and fresh, bringing Döblin to a new generation of readers. A welcome refurbishing of a masterpiece of literary modernism, one of the most significant German novels of the 20th century.” —Kirkus, starred review
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.
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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 becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” 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.
For our May meeting, we’ll be discussing Bloodlines & Fencelines by D.L.S. Evatt.
“A twisty whodunit that’s crafted with care and saturated with down-home Southern charm.” —Kirkus Reviews
Sheriff Ray Crawford Osborne is in over his head when someone murders the First Lady of Lantz, Texas. Suspects include her persnickety husband who has financial problems; their daughter who bears a lifetime of psychological scars; a businesswoman with a reputation for revenge; a nasty local drunk; a combat veteran who came home from Afghanistan with the kind of battle scars you can’t see; the richest man in town who is nursing an open wound; and a young man who had a peculiar relationship with the victim. Osborne may not know much about detective work but he knows the secrets and lies of everyone in town…
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Join us via Zoom for a conversation between Fernando A. Flores, author of the recently released short story collection Valleyesque, and Edward Carey.
“These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores’s deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives.” —Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
The stories in Valleyesque dance between the fantastical and the hyperreal with dexterous, often hilarious flair. A dying Frédéric Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Juárez in the aftermath of his mother’s death, attempting to recover his beloved piano that was seized at the border, while a muralist is taken on a psychedelic journey by an airbrushed Emiliano Zapata T-shirt. A woman is engulfed by a used-clothing warehouse with a life of its own, and a grieving mother breathlessly chronicles the demise of a town decimated by violence. In two separate stories, queso dip and musical rhythms are bottled up and sold for mass consumption. And in the final tale, Flores pieces together the adventures of a young Lee Harvey Oswald as he starts a music career in Texas.
Swinging between satire and surrealism, grief and joy, Valleyesque is a boundary- and border-pushing collection from a one-of-a-kind stylist and voice. With the visceral imagination that made his debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, a cult classic, Flores brings his vision of the border to life—and beyond.
Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator who was born in Norfolk, England. He is the author of the novels Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva: the Twins Who Saved a City, and of the YA Iremonger Trilogy, which have all been translated into many different languages and all of which he illustrated. His novel Little has been published in 20 countries; his most recent novel is The Swallowed Man, which is set inside the belly of an enormous sea beast. He has taught creative writing and fairy tales on numerous occasions at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and at the Michener Center, and the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.
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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Laura Villareal’s new poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving. With guests Ana Portnoy Brimmer, T.K. Lê, and Alfredo Aguilar.
Tumbleweeds and wandering cacti litter the page, coyotes croon at the prose. In poems haunted by specters of intimate partner violence, Girl’s Guide to Leaving considers what it means to escape the love that trapped you and find a temporary home in the barely cooled ashes of a wildfire.
Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and the chapbook The Cartography of Sleep (Nostrovia!, 2018). She has received fellowships from the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and National Book Critics Circle. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, AGNI, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Ana Portnoy Brimmer (pictured left) is a poet and organizer from Puerto Rico. She holds a BA and an MA from the University of Puerto Rico, and is an alumna of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. To Love An Island, her debut poetry collection, was originally the winner of YesYes Books’ 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. She is currently working on the Spanish edition, forthcoming from La Impresora. Ana is the winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest 2020, and was named one of Poets & Writers 2021 Debut Poets. She is the daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants, resides in Puerto Rico and lives for dance parties and revolution.
T.K. Lê (she/her; pictured middle) is a multi-genre writer who grew up in Westminster, CA. She received her M.A. from UCLA in Asian American Studies, is an alum of the VONA Voices summer writing workshop, and was a 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, and in the W.W. Norton anthology, Inheriting the War. She serves as a board member for Viet Rainbow of Orange County, a grassroots organization that primarily works with LGBTQ+ Vietnamese Americans and their loved ones. She loves the outdoors and even more than that, she loves cats.
Alfredo Aguilar (pictured right) is the author of On This Side of the Desert, selected by Natalie Diaz for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What Happens On Earth. He is a recipient of 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Frost Place. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Waxwing, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Born and raised in North County San Diego, he currently resides in Central Texas where he is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.
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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 becky@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.
May’s title is The Whispering House by Elizabeth Brooks.
Freya Lyell is struggling to move on from her sister Stella’s death five years ago. Visiting the bewitching Byrne Hall, only a few miles from the scene of the tragedy, she discovers a portrait of Stella–a portrait she had no idea existed, in a house Stella never set foot in. Or so she thought.
Driven to find out more about her sister’s secrets, Freya is drawn into the world of Byrne Hall and its owners: charismatic artist Cory and his sinister, watchful mother. But as Freya lingers in this mysterious, centuries-old house, her relationship with Cory crosses the line into obsession and the darkness behind the locked doors of the estate threatens to spill out.
In prose as lush and atmospheric as Byrne Hall itself, Elizabeth Brooks weaves a simmering, propulsive tale of art, sisterhood, and all-consuming love: the ways it can lead us toward tenderness, nostalgia, and longing, as well as shocking acts of violence.
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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 the work of Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist Roberto Bolaño. May’s title is By Night in Chile, translated by Chris Andrews (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 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.
As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile‘s single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel—Roberto Bolano’s first work available in English—recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study the disintegration of the churches, a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned—after the destruction of Allende—the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer.
Born in Santiago, Chile, Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968. He went back to Chile in 1973 to “help build socialism” (as he wrote in his story “Dance Card”), but less than a month after his return Pinochet seized power. Bolaño was arrested and imprisoned in Concepción. After his release, he returned to Mexico before moving to Paris and then on to Barcelona. Bolaño has been acclaimed as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag), “a spellbinder” (Newsweek), and “never less than mesmerizing” (Los Angeles Times). Winner of many prizes, including the Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, Bolaño wrote ten novels, two collections of short stories and five books of poetry before he died at the age of 50, on July 15, 2003.
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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. 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.
June’s selection is Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt.
Set in 1970s Japan, this tender and poetic novel about a young, single mother struggling to find her place in the world is an early triumph by a modern Japanese master.
Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko Odaka departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a brief affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge that she also hopes will free her. Takiko’s first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn. At first she seeks refuge in the company of other women–in the hospital, in her son’s nursery–but as the baby grows, her life becomes less circumscribed as she explores Tokyo, then ventures beyond the city into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and desire for a wilder freedom.
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.
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Meeting ID: 873 0586 6271
Passcode: 056750
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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
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. 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.
June’s pick is Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by D.M. Low.
After WWII, a small Italian town struggles to emerge from under the thumb of Fascism. With wit, tenderness, and irony, Elsa, the novel’s narrator, weaves a rich tapestry of provincial Italian life: two generations of neighbors and relatives, their gossip and shattered dreams, their heartbreaks and struggles to find happiness. Elsa wants to imagine a future for herself, free from the expectations and burdens of her town’s history, but the weight of the past will always prove unbearable, insistently posing the question: “Why has everything been ruined?”
“The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original.” —Rachel Cusk
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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 becky@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 June meeting, we’ll be discussing Country of Origin by Dalia Azim.
Country of Origin is a multigenerational family saga that cuts between political revolution in 1950s Egypt and the personal revolutions of four family members whose lives intersect around the disappearance of one of their own.
Seventeen-year-old Halah Ibrahim has always known a privileged life and never had cause to question it until Cairo goes up in flames. Not only does she start to doubt her father and his role in the new military-backed government—but she ultimately decides to flee to America with a young soldier she hardly knows, an impulsive act that has far-reaching consequences on both sides of the ocean. A powerful and universal debut novel about family, identity, and independence, Country of Origin is as much about a nation’s coming-of-age as it is about secrets and lies, love and truth.
Dalia Azim’s work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train (where she received their Short Story Award for New Writers), Other Voices, Alcalde, and Sightlines, among other places. She lives in Austin, TX, where she is the manager of special projects at the Blanton Museum of Art. Previously she worked as a researcher at the Dedalus Foundation and as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art. She graduated with a dual degree in art and literature from Stanford University and grew up in Canada and Colorado.
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Passcode: 906040
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 the work of Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist Roberto Bolaño. June’s title is Amulet, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews.
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 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.
Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño’s acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the “Mother of Mexican Poetry,” hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University. She’s tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women: the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the ’70s, and the last words of the novel are: “And that song is our amulet.”
Born in Santiago, Chile, Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968. He went back to Chile in 1973 to “help build socialism” (as he wrote in his story “Dance Card”), but less than a month after his return Pinochet seized power. Bolaño was arrested and imprisoned in Concepción. After his release, he returned to Mexico before moving to Paris and then on to Barcelona. Bolaño has been acclaimed as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag), “a spellbinder” (Newsweek), and “never less than mesmerizing” (Los Angeles Times). Winner of many prizes, including the Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, Bolaño wrote ten novels, two collections of short stories and five books of poetry before he died at the age of 50, on July 15, 2003.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 849 5387 8798
Passcode: 805833
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 becky@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.
June’s title is The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver.
Only a couple of days before the state visit of the President of the United States, Filiberto García—an impeccably groomed “gun for hire,” ex–Mexican revolutionary, and classic antihero—is recruited by the Mexican police to discover how much truth there might be to KGB and CIA reports of a Chinese-Mongolian plot to assassinate the Mexican and American presidents during the unveiling of a statue in Mexico City.
García kills various criminals as he searches for clues in the opium dens, curio shops, and Cantonese restaurants of Mexico City’s Chinatown—clues that appear to point not to Mongolia, but to Cuba. Yet as the bodies pile up, he begins to find traces of slimy political dealings: are local gears grinding away in these machinations of an “international incident”? Pulsating behind the smokescreen of this classic noir are fierce curses, a shockingly innocent affair, smoldering dialog, and unforgettable riffs about the meaning of life, the Mexican Revolution, women, and the best gun to use for close-range killing.
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Meeting ID: 897 1563 0523
Passcode: 064113
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. 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.
July’s selection is The Stone Face by William Gardner Smith.
“A courageous novel … The Stone Face represents the maturing of a voice determined to confound preconceived notions about patriotism, Blackness and sanctuary, and accordingly the story takes no prisoners, so to speak.” —James Hannaham, New York Times
As a teenager, Simeon Brown lost an eye in a racist attack, and this young African American journalist has lived in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension ever since. After a violent encounter with white sailors, Simeon makes up his mind to move to Paris, known as a safe haven for black artists and intellectuals, and before long he is under the spell of the City of Light, where he can do as he likes and go where he pleases without fear. Through Babe, another black American émigré, he makes new friends, and soon he has fallen in love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. At the same time, however, Simeon begins to suspect that Paris is hardly the racial wonderland he imagined: The French government is struggling to suppress the revolution in Algeria, and Algerians are regularly stopped and searched, beaten, and arrested by the French police, while much worse is to come, it will turn out, in response to the protest march of October 1961. Through his friendship with Hossein, an Algerian radical, Simeon realizes that he can no longer remain a passive spectator to French injustice. He must decide where his true loyalties lie.
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:
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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
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. 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.
July’s pick is Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks.
Meet Margaret. At age twelve, she was head detective of the mystery club Girls Can Solve Anything. Margaret and her three best friends led exciting lives solving crimes, having adventures, and laughing a lot. But now that she’s entered high school, the club has disbanded, and Margaret is unmoored—she doesn’t want to grow up, and she wishes her friends wouldn’t either. Instead, she opts out, developing an eating disorder that quickly takes over her life. When she lands in a treatment center, Margaret finds her path to recovery twisting sideways as she pursues a string of new mysteries involving a ghost, a hidden passage, disturbing desires, and her own vexed relationship with herself.
Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body reimagines nineties adolescence—mashing up girl group series, choose-your-own-adventures, and chronicles of anorexia—in a queer and trans coming-of-age tale like no other. An interrogation of girlhood and nostalgia, dysmorphia and dysphoria, this debut novel puzzles through the weird, ever-evasive questions of growing up.
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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 becky@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 July meeting, we’ll be discussing The Third Door by Jim Williams, and Jim will join us for part of our conversation.
23-year-old Bobby Kaufmann spends his time drinking and making hand-to-hand sales. With one day bleeding into the next, Bobby begins to understand the futility of his way of life. Not lost on him is that every single woman he knows is less interested in him for who he is than what he can get them. For the first time, this state of affairs begins to bother him. So, he resolves to change. The novel opens depicting Bobby’s terrifying youth as his mother submits to an enormous drug habit. The rest of the novel chronicles an unsettling eight weeks in which the young adult Bobby, mired in the conflicts of his dead-end youth, tries to make the transition from professional criminal to a legitimate owner of a bar on Austin’s famed Sixth Street. Although more resolved than ever to end his self-destructive ways, the real question finally emerges—is Bobby Kaufmann capable of change?
Born and raised in Houston, Jim Williams received a BA in political science from the University of Houston, followed by an MA in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. Williams is a sixth-generation Texan who has lived in Austin for more than twenty-five years. He is currently hard at work on his second novel.
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 few months we’ll be discussing the work of Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist Roberto Bolaño. July’s title is Distant Star, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews.
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 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.
The star of Roberto Bolaño’s hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multi-media enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this “star” in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet’s regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and see signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolaño’s darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolaño’s world there’s a big graveyard and there’s a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as “a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.”) Many Chilean authors have written about the “bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders,” Richard Eder commented in the New York Times: “None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolaño.”
Born in Santiago, Chile, Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968. He went back to Chile in 1973 to “help build socialism” (as he wrote in his story “Dance Card”), but less than a month after his return Pinochet seized power. Bolaño was arrested and imprisoned in Concepción. After his release, he returned to Mexico before moving to Paris and then on to Barcelona. Bolaño has been acclaimed as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag), “a spellbinder” (Newsweek), and “never less than mesmerizing” (Los Angeles Times). Winner of many prizes, including the Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, Bolaño wrote ten novels, two collections of short stories and five books of poetry before he died at the age of 50, on July 15, 2003.
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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 becky@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.
July’s title is Reason to Kill: An Amos Parisman Mystery by Andy Weinberger.
“Amos Parisman is one of the most unique PIs in literary history.” —Gumshoe Magazine
Somewhat-retired L.A. private eye Amos Parisman is hired by lonely booking agent Pinky Bleistiff to find one of his missing singers, Risa Barsky. But what starts as a simple investigation turns into a complex puzzle when Pinky is murdered and Risa is still nowhere to be found. With suspects dropping dead at every turn, Parisman must act quickly to discover the truth about Risa’s relationship with Pinky before an innocent person gets sent to prison…
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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Rob Stanton’s new poetry collection, Journeys. With readings from Rob, as well as guests Cathy Eisenhower, Ken Jacobs, and Ashley Smith Keyfitz.
“Through translation, through omission, through compression and the minimalist precision of ‘canny wee things,’ Rob Stanton creates a marvelous texture of voices and references which offers us a glimpse of the just-barely-thereness of a world thought into being by language.” —Stephen Collis
“Stanton is a collagist of tone and function … gathering up our linguistic detritus and redeploying it as something beguiling and beautiful.” —Jon Stone
Born, raised and educated in the UK, Rob Stanton has lived and taught in Austin, Texas for a decade now. He is the author of The Method (Penned in the Margins, 2011) as well as Journeys (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2022), plus the chapbooks Trip- (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2013) and, in collaboration with Colin Winborn, Takes, Cuts (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2017).
Ashley Smith Keyfitz us the author of the chapbooks Water Shed, Come Such Frequency, Pigeon of Tears, and the full-length collection Park of Unwired Asking, as well as other small books and ephemera. She lives in Austin.
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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. 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.
August’s selection is That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda, translated from the Italian by William Weaver.
In a large apartment house in central Rome, two crimes are committed within a matter of days: a burglary, in which a good deal of money and precious jewels are taken, and a murder, as a young woman whose husband is out of town is found with her throat cut. Called in to investigate, melancholy Detective Ciccio, a secret admirer of the murdered woman and a friend of her husband’s, discovers that almost everyone in the apartment building is somehow involved in the case, and with each new development the mystery only deepens and broadens. Gadda’s sublimely different detective story presents a scathing picture of fascist Italy while tracking the elusiveness of the truth, the impossibility of proof, and the infinite complexity of the workings of fate, showing how they come into conflict with the demands of justice and love.
Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alberto Moravia all considered That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana to be the great modern Italian novel. Unquestionably, it is a work of universal significance and protean genius: a rich social novel, a comic opera, an act of political resistance, a blazing feat of baroque wordplay, and a haunting story of life and death.
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.
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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 becky@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 August meeting, we’ll be discussing Bad Habits by Amy Gentry, and Amy will join us for part of the discussion.
A whip-smart psychological thriller from the author of Good as Gone (a New York Times Notable Book), in which a grad student becomes embroiled in a deadly rivalry that changes her into someone unrecognizable to her struggling family, her ambitious academic friends, and even herself.
Claire “Mac” Woods—a professor enjoying her newfound hotshot status at an academic conference—finally has the acceptance and admiration she has long craved. But at the conference’s hotel bar, Mac is surprised to run into a face from a past she’d rather forget: the moneyed, effortlessly perfect Gwendolyn Whitney, Mac’s foil, rival, and former best friend…
Bad Habits follows Mac’s reckoning between her hardscrabble past and tenuous present. What, exactly, did Mac do to get what she has today? And what will she do to keep it? With taut, powerful prose, Amy Gentry asks how far we’ll go to get what we want—and whether we can ever truly leave the past behind.
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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! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.
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. 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.
August’s pick is Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza.
Carribean Fragoza’s debut story collection resides in the domestic surreal, featuring an unusual gathering of Latinx and Chicanx voices from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, and universes beyond. Fragoza’s imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women’s wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
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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 first book will be Belladonna, translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth.
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 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.
“One of the strangest and strongest books.” —Times Literary Supplement
Belladonna: also known as deadly nightshade, devil’s berries, death cherries, beautiful death, devil’s herb, which sounds terrifying and threatening. Belladonna also carried a tamer name, dog’s cherry, and an almost magical one, fairy plant. Andreas Ban, a psychologist who no longer psychologizes, a writer who no longer writes, lives alone in a coastal town in Croatia. His body is failing him. He sifts through the remnants of his life—his research, books, medical records, photographs—remembering old lovers and friends, the tragedies of WWII, the breakup of Yugoslavia.…
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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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 becky@malvernbooks.com with “mystery book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased 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.
August’s pick is Nylund, the Sarcophager by Joyelle McSweeney.
Nylund, the Sarcophager is a baroque noir. Its eponymous protagonist is a loner who tries to comprehend everything from the outside, like a sarcophagus, and with analogously ornate results. The method by which the book was written, and by which Nylund experiences the world, is thus called sarcography. Sarcography is like negative capability on steroids; this ultra-susceptibility entangles Nylund in both a murder plot and a plot regarding his missing sister, Daisy. As the murder plot places Nylund in increasing danger, his sensuous memories become more present than the present itself.
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Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted this month by 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 becky@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.
September’s selection is The Flanders Road by Claude Simon, translated from the French by Richard Howard.
On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army’s panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper.
This is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel The Flanders Road. Here Simon’s own memories overlap with those of his central character, Georges, whose captain, a distant relative, dies a similar death. Georges reviews the circumstances and sense—or senselessness—of that death, first in the company of a fellow prisoner in a POW camp and then some years later in the course of an ever more erotically charged visit to the captain’s widow, Corinne. As he does, other stories emerge: Corinne’s prewar affair with the jockey Iglésia, who would become the captain’s orderly; the possible suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor, whose grim portrait loomed large in Georges’s childhood home; Georges’s learned father, whose books are no help against barbarism. The great question throughout, the question that must be urgently asked even as it remains unanswerable, is whether fiction can confront and respond to the trauma of history.
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.
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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 becky@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 September meeting, we’ll be discussing Body and Bread by Nan Cuba, and Nan will join us for part of the discussion.
Years after her brother Sam’s suicide, Sarah Pelton remains unable to fully occupy her world without him. Now, while her surviving brothers prepare to sell the family’s tenant farm and a young woman’s life hangs in the balance, Sarah is forced to confront the life Sam lived and the secrets he left behind. As she assembles the artifacts of her family’s history in East Texas in the hope of discovering her own future, images from her work as an anthropologist—images of sacrifice, ritual, and rebirth—haunt her waking dreams. In this moving debut novel, Nan Cuba unearths the power of family legacies and the indelible imprint of loss on all our lives.
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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 September book is Doppelgänger, translated by S. D. Curtis and Celia Hawkesworth.
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 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.
Two elderly people, Artur and Isabella, meet and have a passionate sexual encounter on New Year’s Eve. Details of the lives of Artur, a retired army captain, and Isabella, a Holocaust survivor, are revealed through police dossiers. As they fight loneliness and aging, they take comfort in small things: for Artur, a collection of 274 hats; for Isabella, a family of garden gnomes who live in her apartment. Later, we meet Pupi, who dreamed of becoming a sculptor but instead became a chemist and then a spy. As Eileen Battersby wrote, “As he stands, in the zoo, gazing at a pair of rhinos, in a city most likely present-day Belgrade, this battered Everyman feels very alone: ‘I would like to tell someone, anyone, I’d like to tell someone: I buried Mother today.'” Pupi sets out to correct his family’s crimes by returning silverware to its original Jewish owners through the help of an unlikely friend, a pawnbroker. Described by Drndic as “my ugly little book,” Doppelgänger was her personal favorite.
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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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 becky@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.
September’s pick is The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown.
In the rough edges of 1940s Chicago, the discovery of a corpse in an alleyway isn’t always enough to cause a big stir—especially when the victim is killed in the midst of a night-long bender, caught between barrooms in what appears to be a mugging gone awry. Which is why the police don’t take a huge interest in finding the murderer of Wallace Hunter, a linotype operator who turns up dead after a solitary drinking adventure that led through many of the Loop’s less reputable establishments. But for his teenage son, Ed, and his carny brother, Am, something about Wallace’s death feels fishy, a fact that grows increasingly bothersome when it becomes clear that some of the witnesses aren’t telling the whole story. In order to get to the heart of the matter, they’ll need all the skills Am picked up in the circus life—skills that young Ed will have to pick up on fast. And in the process of discovering the killer, they make another discovery as well: Wallace was a much different man than the father Ed thought he knew. The Edgar Award-winning novel that announced a legendary voice in crime fiction, The Fabulous Clipjoint is the first in Fredric Brown’s long-running Ed & Am Hunter series. The book’s memorable mixture of a hardboiled mystery with an urban coming of age narrative remains fresh to this day.
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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:
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Join us for a conversation between Rita Zoey Chin and Cecily Sailer. They’ll be discussing Rita Zoey Chin’s new novel, The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern (Melville House Publishing). This event will take place via Zoom.
Author photo: C.E. Courtney
The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is an enchanting novel about the transcendent power of the imagination, the magic at the threshold of past and present, and the will it takes to love. When 6-year-old empath Leah Fern—once “The Youngest and Very Best Fortune Teller in the World”—is abandoned by her beautiful magician mother, she is consumed with longing for her mother’s return… until something bizarre happens: on her 21st birthday, Leah receives an inheritance from someone she doesn’t even know, and finds herself launched on a journey of magical discovery. It’s a voyage that will spiral across the United States, Canada, into the Arctic Circle and beyond—and help her make her own life whole by piecing together the mystery surrounding her mother’s disappearance.
Rita Zoey Chin is the author of the widely praised memoir, Let the Tornado Come. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and is the recipient of a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, an Academy of American Poets Award, and a Bread Loaf scholarship. She has taught at Towson University and at Grub Street in Boston. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Tin House, and Marie Claire. The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is her first novel.
Zoom Information:
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Meeting ID: 821 0432 8050
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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:
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Passcode: 853153
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:
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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.
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Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Fall 2022 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Sophia Stid’s But for I Am a Woman.
The lineup is still being finalized—check back soon!
No need to register, this event will be live streaming at 7pm (central) through Malvern Books’ YouTube page.
In But for I Am a Woman, Sophia Stid’s work explores the intersection of personal autonomy and deep spiritual connection through the writings and life of Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342 – 1416), a mystic who was the first woman known to write a book in the English language, “a woman who had herself / declared dead / so she could write.” Through this companionship, Stid creates a reliquary of language, poems as physical containers for the sacred, gathered like loose rosary beads from the floorboards. It is through the physical body that these poems eloquently chisel a space for reconciliation and grief-healing, bathing “in water, words, and other lives.”
These are poems that seek the liberation of Self, and of womankind, through fluid contemplation as the speaker moves through her own process of grief-healing. She discovers with Julian that “when the book of the world opens, it is not / as we thought,” that it is through brokenness, blood, and tears—through the body—that the spirit is found, and ignited.
Sophia Stid is a poet from California. She was the 2019 – 2022 Ecotone Postgraduate Fellow at UNC Wilmington and a recent graduate of the MFA program at Vanderbilt University and Georgetown University, where she studied poetry and theology. She is the winner of the 2021 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose from Gulf Coast and has received fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Recent poems and essays can be found or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, and Kenyon Review, among others.
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.
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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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87614085101?pwd=TlhJak1wcWVuTWMyVE42VlFYT2dxUT09
Meeting ID: 876 1408 5101
Passcode: 135022
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:
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Meeting ID: 899 4090 6066
Passcode: 323854
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.
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