Malvern Books

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. ***

This month’s pick is The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson.

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of autotheory offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson’s relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and family. An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

“Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts exists in its own universe. My first reaction to Nelson’s book was awestruck silence, such as one might experience when confronted with some dazzling supernatural phenomenon. Nelson is so outrageously gifted a writer and thinker that The Argonauts seems to operate in some astral dimension where the rules of normal physics have been suspended. Her book is an elegant, powerful, deeply discursive examination of gender, sexuality, queerness, pregnancy and motherhood, all conveyed in language that is intellectually potent and poetically expressive.” —The Washington Post

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81436024137?pwd=QUJzOWZNb05SWnFkMW1FK0Y0QXZmdz09

Meeting ID: 814 3602 4137
Passcode: 260646

If you don’t have Zoom, this event can also be viewed live on our YouTube channel.

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.

This month’s selection is No Room at the Morgue by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated from the French by Alyson Waters.

Inspired by the works of Dashiell Hammett, No Room at the Morgue is Jean-Patrick Manchette’s unparalleled take on the private eye novel—fierce, politically inflected, and finely rendered by the haunting, pitch-black prose for which the author is famed. No Room at the Morgue came out after Jean-Patrick Manchette had transformed French crime fiction with such brilliantly plotted, politically charged, unrelentingly violent tales as Nada and The Mad and the Bad. Here, inspired by his love of Dashiell Hammett, Manchette introduces Eugene Tarpon, private eye, a sometime cop who has set up shop after being kicked off the force for accidentally killing a political demonstrator. Months have passed, and Tarpon desultorily tries to keep in shape while drinking all the time. No one has shown up at the door of his office in the midst of the market district of Les Halles. Then the bell rings and a beautiful woman bursts in, her hands dripping blood. It’s Memphis Charles, her roommate’s throat has been cut, and Memphis can’t go to the police because they’ll only suspect her. Can Tarpon help? Well, somehow he can’t help trying. Soon bodies mount, and the craziness only grows.

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/83721805823?pwd=Y05tbklGUGMrVTdlVUJYMVAzSXFZQT09

Meeting ID: 837 2180 5823
Passcode: 016822

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 August meeting, we’ll be discussing The Preacher’s First Murder by K.P. Gresham, who will join us for part of the discussion.

He was a good cop until he ran into a bad one. Then, to save what was left of his family and his sanity, Michael Hogan, Jr., entered the Fed’s Witness Protection Program and became Pastor Matthew Hayden. Just out of seminary, Matt takes a church in rural Texas, expecting peace, quiet and a good dose of humility. What he finds is a town ruled by the past and an old woman murdered. To make matters worse, the dead woman’s daughter, Angie O’Day, runs the town’s Ice House and is truly an angel by day and a devil by night. Matt might be a man of God now, but he is still a man. When the second body is discovered and accusations are levied at the innocent Angie, Matt has to put on an old hat–his cop’s hat–and discover the buried secrets of Wilks, Texas.

K.P. Gresham refers to herself as “professional character assassin.” She writes mysteries because that’s her favorite genre to read. Heavily influenced by Agatha Christie (what mystery writer isn’t?), Louise Penny, and J.D. Robb, K.P. created Pastor Matt Hayden, a former cop turned preacher who can’t stop falling over dead bodies. The Pastor Matt Hayden Mystery Series includes The Preacher’s First Murder, Murder in the Second Pew, and the 2020 Silver Falchion award finalist Murder on the Third Try. K.P. is elbow deep in writing the next in the series, Four Reasons to Die. K.P. and her husband moved from Illinois to Texas 35+ years ago and immediately fell in love with not shoveling snow. She finds that her dual country citizenship, the Midwest and Texas, provides deep fodder for her award-winning novels. Her varied careers as a media librarian and technical director, middle school literature teacher and theatre playwright and director add humor and truth to her stories. A graduate of Houston’s Rice University Novels Writing Colloquium, K.P. now resides in Austin, Texas. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, The Writers League of Texas, and Austin Mystery Writers, as well as the President of the Sisters in Crime, Heart of Texas Chapter.

Join Zoom meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83752996075?pwd=cG1YK0ZDSVRMZUp2K2R2MjQ3anhmdz09

Meeting ID: 837 5299 6075
Passcode: 268699

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.

This month’s title is Pull Me Under by Kelly Luce.

Kelly Luce’s Pull Me Under “is a suspense novel with a female protagonist that gets more right about women than so many others I’ve read in the past few years” (NPR).
Luce tells the story of Rio Silvestri, who, when she was twelve years old, fatally stabbed a school bully. Rio, born Chizuru Akitani, is the Japanese American daughter of the revered violinist Hiro Akitani–a Living National Treasure in Japan and a man Rio hasn’t spoken to since she left her home country for the United States (and a new identity) after her violent crime. Her father’s death, along with a mysterious package that arrives on her doorstep in Boulder, Colorado, spurs her to return to Japan for the first time in twenty years. There she is forced to confront her past in ways she never imagined, pushing herself, her relationships with her husband and daughter, and her own sense of who she is to the brink.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83783384810?pwd=eWxrME1raU0xdExYazhSU1VSbmxaQT09

Meeting ID: 837 8338 4810
Passcode: 353443

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. August’s novel is The Passion According to G.H., translated from the Portuguese by Idra Novey.

“Lispector’s most unrelenting and serious work.” — Rachel Kushner

G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door on it. The sight of the dying insect provokes a mystical crisis, at the height which comes one of the most famous and most genuinely shocking scenes in Latin American literature. Clarice Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”

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.

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89447154514?pwd=OTU0bE51OE1Od2t4VFZjZHczSmlBQT09

Meeting ID: 894 4715 4514
Passcode: 107358

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Claire, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This meeting will take place via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store, or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit.

On Saturday, August 28th, at 1pm we’ll be discussing Dreaming Escape by Valentina Saraçini, translated by Erica Weitzman.

“In Erica Weitzman’s resolute translation, Valentina Saraçini’s staccato-grammared voice sketches a double space—the pulsing emotional landscape of resistance, negation, revision, set in a particular place of trees, stones, gods, color, history. A subtle navigational chart to an inner coast of Albania we have not known of until now.”—Natasa Durovicova

“This collection of Albanian poetry from Kosovo does a wonderful job of bringing a fascinating and important but little-known European literature to a broader audience. The translations are fluid and faithful, rendering beautifully in English both the sense and the sentiment of the original Albanian, which itself is deeply affecting.”—Victor A. Friedman, University of Chicago

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82233102045?pwd=SThoQUdCMjJJNlFweUM0UDFsV1pSUT09

Meeting ID: 822 3310 2045
Passcode: 932784

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.

This month’s selection is Good Behaviour by Molly Keane.

Is it possible to kill with kindness? As Molly Keane’s Booker Prize–short-listed dark comedy suggests, not only can kindness be deadly, it just may be the best form of revenge. The novel opens as Aroon St. Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon—the silver gleams, the linens glow—of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises. In fact, a single whiff of the stuff is enough to knock the old lady dead. “All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,” says Aroon soon after. In the pages that follow she will make her case, reminiscing about her youth among the hunting-and-fishing classes of Ireland, a faded aristocracy dedicated to distraction even as their fortunes dwindle. Keane’s brilliant sleight of hand is to allow her blinkered heroine to narrate her own development from neglected child, to ungainly debutante, to bitter spinster: Aroon understands nothing, yet she reveals all.

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/87173961727?pwd=Y29PY0ZtSzh4RzN3b1M0U2IwcGVxUT09

Meeting ID: 871 7396 1727
Passcode: 664868

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. ***

September’s pick is Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches.

Through war and its aftermath, a woman fights to keep her daughters safe.

As a girl she sees her village sacked and her beloved father and brothers flee. Her life in danger, she joins the rebellion in the hills, where her comrades force her to give up the baby she conceives. Years later, having outlived countless men, she leaves to find her lost daughter, travelling across the Atlantic with meagre resources. She returns to a community riven with distrust, fear and hypocrisy in the wake the revolution.

Hernandez’ narrators have the level gaze of ordinary women reckoning with extraordinary hardship. Denouncing the ruthless machismo of combat with quiet intelligence, Slash and Burn creates a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87894326788?pwd=eHZwRmw1RHIzUkNwbk1WRTRXVkk1Zz09

Meeting ID: 878 9432 6788
Passcode: 037754

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. September’s novel is The Hour of the Star.

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.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life’s unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn’t seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader’s preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

“Every page vibrates with feeling. It’s not enough to say that Lispector bends language or uses words in new ways. Plenty of modernists do that. No one else writes prose this rich.” —Lily Meyer, NPR

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84338428673?pwd=L3JRZ3FEeWxRZnVoSVNvTEZ5K0RpQT09

Meeting ID: 843 3842 8673
Passcode: 397587

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 September meeting, we’ll be discussing Crossing Lines by Pamela Ellen Ferguson.

In this fast-paced thriller, Austin based architect “Buzzy” McBride is thrown into a sleuth role when her converted rail-yard home on the banks of Lady Bird Lake becomes a crime scene after a grisly murder. Fearing an unknown youth was butchered in a case of mistaken identity as revenge for an investigative report her late brother produced about the Mexican cartels, she races to locate her nephew Rory who is missing. The murder leads Buzzy across Austin and the Border to unravel a web of family secrets in a West Texas/Mexico land inheritance dispute rooted in the Spanish colonial era. Tech-savvy Buzzy quickly applies her creative, forensic, and land-use policy know-how to peel away her brother’s polyamorous past to resolve the crime. She is helped by an eccentric cast of characters—Grace Colvin, her sharp-witted African-American lawyer; Sister Colleen, a tough Irish nun who runs Border sanctuaries for undocumented youth; Isabel Ramirez, a Del Rio cafe owner with eyes on both sides of the Border; and Austin PD homicide detective, the poetic Eddie Zuniga.

Crossing Lines is Pam’s 11th book. She’s a global author, who calls Austin home after living and working in a dozen world capitals. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, she is dual national American and British. She’s published both fiction and non-fiction, including textbooks in Asian Medicine, her second career.

* * *

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88192900634?pwd=MWxDWkJYUm8rZVBhOGFwM3R6V0lVdz09

Meeting ID: 881 9290 0634
Passcode: 378878

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.

September’s title is The Woman on the Roof by Helen Nielsen.

Wilma Rathjen lives above the garage with a view of the apartments below. Her brother Curtis has provided this safe haven for her after her breakdown. The last thing Wilma wants to do is go back to the institution. So when she looks out of her window and sees the body of her neighbor, Jeri Lynn, lying dead in her bathtub, she doesn’t call the police. She waits—if the body is really there, one of the other tenants will discover it. And discover it they do. But is this really an accident? Sergeant Osgood is not so sure. Curtis himself was known to visit Miss Lynn. The young nurse, Ann Jenner, definitely has something to hide; the old gardener, Wallace Timm, is acting evasive; and pretty-boy Tony Carmen is decidedly defensive. And then there’s serviceman Phillip Blade, who shows up claiming to be Jeri’s husband. Only Wilma could have seen what happened—and that someone might try to kill her next…

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86092793462?pwd=c01ERmI0akg2aDUyeTNOZnplaCtRUT09

Meeting ID: 860 9279 3462
Passcode: 090503.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Claire, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This meeting will take place via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store, or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit.

This month’s pick is Rome by Dorothea Lasky.

Dorothea Lasky is one of the most talented American poets of her generation. With haunting lines that “recall Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg” (Chicago Tribune) and influences ranging from Drake to Catullus, Lasky fuses the ancient world with the fierceness and heartbreak of everyday life. With each new book, from the grand religiosity of AWE to the flat sadness and nihilism of Black Life to the witchery of Thunderbird, her poems keep gaining an increasingly robust readership and have influenced an entire generation of younger poets. In Rome, Lasky finds herself in the arena of eternal longing and heartsick desire, confronting her ghosts and demons and proving she’s “one of the very best poets we’ve got” (Maggie Nelson).

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81699209063?pwd=SzRlbU1mUlQrcTZsdmlZVTJTaXNjUT09

Meeting ID: 816 9920 9063
Passcode: 801848

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.

This month’s selection is Blaise Cendrars’s Moravagine.

At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars’s Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it’s a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when “the whole world was doing a Moravagine.”

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/82313847542?pwd=Y3ZLOFZUeDVVa21sWFA1RzMyUHpzUT09

Meeting ID: 823 1384 7542
Passcode: 196131

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. ***

October’s pick is My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems by Yi Lei, translated by Tracy K. Smith.

Yi Lei published her poem “A Single Woman’s Bedroom” in 1987, when cohabitation before marriage was a punishable crime in China. She was met with major critical acclaim—and with outrage—for her frank embrace of women’s erotic desire and her unabashed critique of oppressive law. Over the span of her revolutionary career, Yi Lei became one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese poetry.

Passionate, rigorous, and inimitable, the poems in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree celebrate the joys of the body, ponder the miracle of compassion, and proclaim an abiding reverence for the natural world. Presented in the original Chinese alongside English translations by Changtai Bi and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith, this collection introduces American readers to a boundless spirit—one “composing an explosion.”

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85637436064?pwd=bTlScmQxejdTNnhTSmhGbzY1c1lNQT09

Meeting ID: 856 3743 6064
Passcode: 495993

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 October meeting, we’ll be discussing Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalia Sylvester.

From the acclaimed author of Chasing the Sun comes a new novel about immigration and the depths to which one Mexican American family will go for forgiveness and redemption.

The first time Isabel meets her father-in-law, Omar, he’s already dead—an apparition appearing uninvited on her wedding day. Her husband, Martin, still unforgiving for having been abandoned by his father years ago, confesses that he never knew the old man had died. So Omar asks Isabel for the impossible: persuade Omar’s family—especially his wife, Elda—to let him redeem himself.
Isabel and Martin settle into married life in a Texas border town, and Omar returns each year on the celebratory Day of the Dead. Every year Isabel listens, but to the aggrieved Martin and Elda, Omar’s spirit remains invisible. Through his visits, Isabel gains insight into not just the truth about his disappearance and her husband’s childhood but also the ways grief can eat away at love. When Martin’s teenage nephew crosses the Mexican border and takes refuge in Isabel and Martin’s home, questions about past and future homes, borders, and belonging arise that may finally lead to forgiveness—and alter all their lives forever.

* * *

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87865707242?pwd=N0FuZTZJNmUzNEhyY0JKQnhNKzZRUT09

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. October’s novel is Near to the Wild Heart, translated by Alison Entrekin.

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.

Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called “Hurricane Clarice”: a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.”

The book was an unprecedented sensation — the discovery of genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89364524564?pwd=UjhXdTZOMm8rQy9jZUVBT2VCcjJHUT09

Meeting ID: 893 6452 4564
Passcode: 402205

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.

October’s title is Jason Marc Harris’ novella Master of Rods and Strings.

Jealous of the attention lavished upon the puppetry talents of his dear sister-and tormented by visions of her torture at the hands of his mysterious Uncle Pavan, who recruited her for his arcane school-Elias is determined to learn the true nature of occult puppetry, no matter the hideous costs, in order to exact vengeance.

“Jason Marc Harris’s Master of Rods and Strings is a masterful work the likes of which I have not read in many years. [. . .] In captivating and expert prose, Master of Rods and Strings brings to life a world where the enchantment of puppetry inexorably descends into a magical perdition.” —Thomas Ligotti

Jason Marc Harris graduated with a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Washington, and an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University, where he served as Fiction Editor of Mid-American Review. Creative work in journals such as Apex and Abyss, Arroyo Literary Review, Bull, Cheap Pop, EveryDay Fiction, Marvels and Tales, Masque and Spectacle, Midwestern Gothic, The Offbeat, Psychopomp Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and Writing Texas. His novella Master of Rods and Strings (Vernacular Books) is available by print and Kindle on July 6th, 2021. He teaches creative writing, folklore, and literature at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87549150131?pwd=QXZBOU9KcnZxWEtCWWs1bG9mbU9nUT09

Meeting ID: 875 4915 0131
Passcode: 342512

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Claire, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This meeting will take place via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store, or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit.

This month’s pick is Shapeshifter by Alice Paalen Rahon, translated by Mary Ann Caws.

Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter, a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Her first husband was the artist Wolfgang Paalen, among her lovers were Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose, and over the years her circle of friends included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Miró, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin. This bilingual edition of Rahon’s poems confirms the achievement of this little-known but visionary writer who defies categorization. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness. For the first time in any language, this book gathers the three collections of poetry Rahon published in her lifetime, along with uncollected and unpublished poems and an album of portraits, manuscript pages, and artworks.

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82272957834?pwd=cldLOUlLYzMyNDUya1hVSE1Cc1pZZz09

Meeting ID: 822 7295 7834
Passcode: 713715

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 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. 

* * *

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.

* * *

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88216588365?pwd=d2dDa1pjUXY3ZVlXaXB5NStTWm1CQT09

Meeting ID: 882 1658 8365
Passcode: 683160

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81345731056?pwd=a3NKZ1kvOFVBcEF3NG9zM1hRZno2Zz09

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.

* * *

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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83059326996?pwd=c1ZkWVlKTlJaWDMyQW8wWitNa2xiQT09

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85449499003?pwd=ZHM4K0U5OGZZMzFGbEdMSm1PdTVhQT09

Meeting ID: 854 4949 9003
Passcode: 121440

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.

* * *

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85300738955?pwd=MCs0TjN4UmZubHRXSjBWZllUYjNRZz09

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83215229436?pwd=czBzeEFTZmpncGRaR3JVWXJvdGwvdz09

Meeting ID: 832 1522 9436
Passcode: 471217

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86339992978?pwd=TzE0cWdKMTduOFJWRlVkSXJFejZIdz09

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86156033800?pwd=ME45SkhEdVhDV21hbEd4MitsdW5kUT09

Meeting ID: 861 5603 3800
Passcode: 145498

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87135900256?pwd=TTlZS21ZVzdkdmVyKzY2ZDVhQ0JWdz09

Meeting ID: 871 3590 0256
Passcode: 067007

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85296324280?pwd=T1d4SVpuTTFqR1FhUXVmdHFQSGdvZz09

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83770000473?pwd=b2F6Z3Z2a0JGbkw1ZHA0WjlMWnpGZz09

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.

* * *

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89375257683?pwd=NGNIQkZmUEdVS2xxQmZ6bi90OWFwZz09

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85843603417?pwd=Q3gvSm9WbkpYd05Ea0E1VDN1VU1xQT09

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82954887752?pwd=U1l3YWcrVFh3MkdQUHovWnRIajJLdz09

Meeting ID: 829 5488 7752
Passcode: 007625

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88078074208?pwd=VEE1QkNQbVAyOW9IV1lLcHgvMGMrQT09

Meeting ID: 880 7807 4208
Passcode: 818299

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86842256767?pwd=RWYrTDV6T0hDMVYzSEc0aXh2TDVWQT09

Meeting ID: 868 4225 6767
Passcode: 100539

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89136190261?pwd=Rkd3VFJvajB2RXNLZTkwb29nUS8yZz09

Meeting ID: 891 3619 0261
Passcode: 283898

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.

* * *

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87946396721?pwd=cUV1ajZnV2dGZldiKy9yQUhDYS82dz09

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85922108280?pwd=U2xRdlQxaUplcWZpMU9EWVpNMmg5dz09

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83393753158?pwd=WGd6MEtaL3A1UlVwQkZta1djLzlXUT09

Meeting ID: 833 9375 3158
Passcode: 659775

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87645043485?pwd=RGNtckhnbFRLVmkrN1cwQ2g4L2Jkdz09

Meeting ID: 876 4504 3485
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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89157192593?pwd=N0RjMlZWemFqNmpmdGtBTDFqL1l5UT09

Meeting ID: 891 5719 2593
Passcode: 385848

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.

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86998312890?pwd=cUc0ZU96VUZFOERBaFlIWjR5QmVzZz09

Meeting ID: 869 9831 2890
Passcode: 206641

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85637802160?pwd=Q3VqWXFDbkJwNll3b2E4Z2xGcG1DQT09

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86198683625?pwd=cDBoZG5DNVY1SjdoOU50MWNRK1V5dz09

Meeting ID: 861 9868 3625
Passcode: 152613

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83441477480?pwd=dm1iUURHMmRFTDdtQU1tSlhja2NOUT09

Meeting ID: 834 4147 7480
Passcode: 188626

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP 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…

Join Zoom meeting:

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP 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.

* * *

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. 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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87305866271?pwd=KbQphLneNLLgZoBA2P6Zfpdb40CBBW.1

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83980121660?pwd=9pMHzDKD8ltbmpFhJwO2Xe9LHNRXOc.1

Meeting ID: 839 8012 1660
Passcode: 985875

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.

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. 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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP 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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89715630523?pwd=NDNDeTVEZUM5dTBvdjBEaFJGbTlMQT09

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP 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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89504078216?pwd=c0U3dW5rUlJiNnRmVWtVTlNzZm1idz09

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…

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88909056604?pwd=SFdoSXgzVHN5NzFHZ0YvaUg4K3Nadz09

Meeting ID: 889 0905 6604
Passcode: 844533

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89184053489?pwd=RXFYZnlPY3h3by9qVEphc3pHUlZXZz09

Meeting ID: 891 8405 3489
Passcode: 079722

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.

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.

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81344794696?pwd=MjNIQWNXdEtHeDNscnFxcXV5RUp0dz09

Meeting ID: 813 4479 4696
Passcode: 015585

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP 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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83313975830?pwd=S0tBc01COXowM3FJY1pTS1pWNG9JQT09

Meeting ID: 833 1397 5830
Passcode: 444699

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP 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.

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 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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP 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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84969087722?pwd=cTcxREFINHBKeHdYZzJ5RzJMZTRmZz09

Meeting ID: 849 6908 7722
Passcode: 613647

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted this month by Malvern’s Stephen K. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom meeting:

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

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

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

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

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85650558889?pwd=T1R5Uk1zY0hCVTZ1OVdQNDl3cUI4Zz09

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

Meeting ID: 821 5247 8111
Passcode: 620875

We’ll be at the Texas Book Festival today, 10am – 5pm, booth #415. The festival is held in and around the State Capitol in downtown Austin. The Festival Weekend is FREE and open to the public, featuring nearly 300 authors of the year’s best books across all ages and genres. Hope to see you there!

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted this month by Malvern’s Stephen K. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom Meeting:

We’ll be at the Texas Book Festival today, 11am – 5pm, booth #415. The festival is held in and around the State Capitol in downtown Austin. The Festival Weekend is FREE and open to the public, featuring nearly 300 authors of the year’s best books across all ages and genres. Hope to see you there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom meeting:

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

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

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

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

* * *

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

Meeting ID: 880 7906 8628
Passcode: 157630

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted this month by Malvern’s Stephen K. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom meeting:

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

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

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

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

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

Meeting ID: 816 9987 2386
Passcode: 183742

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

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

December’s pick is Just Thieves by Gregory Galloway.

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

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

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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

Meeting ID: 826 9992 4942
Passcode: 054125