Malvern Books

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

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

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:
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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:

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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:
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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.

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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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:
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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 the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

Sign up to perform here by noon, September 3rd.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event; please check the Facebook event for the link.

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.

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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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.

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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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.

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Join Zoom meeting:
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Meeting ID: 881 9290 0634
Passcode: 378878

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

This month’s featured reader is Eva Shelton, winner of The Insider Prize for Incarcerated Writers in Texas awarded by American Short Fiction.

Eva Shelton is 43 years old and was born and raised in Graham, Texas. In the third grade she started writing stories and poems for school and for fun. At the age of 25 she found herself headed to prison. She would spend the next eighteen years of her life surrounded by razor wire and amputated from societal norms. To pass the time she worked and she wrote. Her writing was her emotional release. She created worlds she could live in and her friends existed in ink on lines. She was released from prison on March 9th of this year and she finally took a deep, gasping breath of relief. She has had to learn to live in a world of technology and overwhelming choices as if she were Rip Van Winkle rising from slumber. The Insider Prize by American Short Fiction is her first monetary award for her writing.

Zoom Info:
https://austincc.zoom.us/j/91931157006?pwd=N3FTbDFROEpSZTNEaDQxTXJyalNGQT09

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:
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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:
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Meeting ID: 816 9920 9063
Passcode: 801848

Join us via Zoom for a reading and discussion with acclaimed writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat, and Alyssa Harad. Doireann and Alyssa will discuss obsession as inspiration, research as the pursuit of ghosts (and what happens when you catch them), and other topics.

In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem Peter Levi has famously called “the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain” during its era. A kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, autofiction, and literary studies, A Ghost in the Throat moves fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and the people who make it.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. A Ghost in the Throat was awarded Irish Book of the Year and described as “powerful” (New York Times) and “sumptuous” (The Sunday Times). She is also author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her most recent book of poems is To Star the Dark.

Alyssa Harad is the author of a memoir, Coming to My Senses, and has published essays in The Nation, Jewish Quarterly, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other venues. She is currently writing a novel inspired by the lives and art of women associated with Surrealism.

Zoom Info:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81812438629?pwd=YU5yNnRjaVpCRnBUWnFiZ1RTUENRQT09

Meeting ID: 818 1243 8629
Passcode: 730401

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 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 in celebrating the US launch for Marian Schwartz’s translation of Nina Berberova’s The Last and the First, from Pushkin Press. Marian will be joined by Philip Boehm, who will be reading from his 2021 translation of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger.

AATIA’s Literary Special Interest Group (LitSIG), in coordination with Malvern Books, has planned this exciting program for this year’s celebration of International Translation Day.

On a crisp September morning, trouble comes to the Gorbatovs’ farm. Having fled revolution and civil war in Russia, the family has worked tirelessly to establish themselves as crop farmers in Provence, their hopes of returning home a distant dream. While young Ilya Stepanovich is committed to this new way of life, his step-brother Vasya looks only to the past. With the arrival of a letter from Paris, a plot to lure Vasya back to Russia begins in earnest, and Ilya must set out for the capital to try to preserve his family’s fragile stability.

The first novel by the celebrated Russian writer Nina Berberova, The Last and the First is an elegant and devastating portrayal of the internal struggles of a generation of émigrés. Appearing for the first time in English in a stunning translation by the prize-winning Marian Schwartz, it shows Berberova in full command of her gifts as a writer of masterful poise and psychological insight.

Marian Schwartz translates Russian classic and contemporary fiction and nonfiction. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including two NEA translation fellowships. Her latest published translation is Nina Berberova’s first novel, The Last and the First. Currently she is working on untranslated works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Philip Boehm has translated more than thirty books and plays by German and Polish writers, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka and Hanna Krall. For these translations he has received numerous awards including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and most recently the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translators Prize. He also works as a theater director and playwright: works for the stage include Alma en venta, Mixtitlan, and Return of the Bedbug. Mr. Boehm is the founding Artistic Director of the Upstream Theater in St. Louis, recipient of the 2021 Missouri Arts Award.

Zoom Info:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84460923645?pwd=eHp4L2x3ZW5ERHJoL0oxKzdheGU1dz09

Meeting ID: 844 6092 3645
Passcode: 384198

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

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.”

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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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.

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

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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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:
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Meeting ID: 875 4915 0131
Passcode: 342512

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

This month’s featured reader is Stephanie Macias.

Stephanie Macias is a writer, artist, and musician living in Austin, TX. She is currently an MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at the The University of Texas at Austin. She is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Zoom Info:
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Meeting ID: 868 8731 8364
Passcode: 914142

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:
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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:
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Meeting ID: 817 2362 5879
Passcode: 888283

Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Fall 2021 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Sequoia Maner’s Little Girl Blue: Poems. Enjoy readings by Sequoia Maner and more. Full line up will be announced soon.

A handful of signed copies are available for curbside pick-up at the store. Unable to pick up at Malvern? Head over to Host Publications!

No need to register, this event will be live streaming at 7pm (central) through the Malvern Books YouTube page here: tinyurl.com/LGB-Launch.

Little Girl Blue: Poems is a collection of elegiac poems that conjures a tapestry of Black voices from history, the victims and the heroes who have helped us see ourselves and the world more truthfully. In these poems, we are not only called to witness injustice, but to hold space for what blooms from it: a confrontation full of exile and longing, an unshakable sense of joy that defies even death.

Sequoia Maner is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature at Spelman College. She is a co-editor of the critical-creative book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2020) and at work on a forthcoming book regarding Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly for the 33 1/3 series (Bloomsbury). Her writing has been published in Auburn Avenue, The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, and other venues.

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted soon on Facebook.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.

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

November’s pick is The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore.

When Wayétu Moore turns five years old, her father and grandmother throw her a big birthday party at their home in Monrovia, Liberia, but all she can think about is how much she misses her mother, who is working and studying in faraway New York. Before she gets the reunion her father promised her, war breaks out in Liberia. The family is forced to flee their home on foot, walking and hiding for three weeks until they arrive in the village of Lai. Finally, a rebel soldier smuggles them across the border to Sierra Leone, reuniting the family and setting them off on yet another journey, this time to the United States. Spanning this harrowing journey in Moore’s early childhood, her years adjusting to life in Texas as a black woman and an immigrant, and her eventual return to Liberia, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is a deeply moving story of the search for home in the midst of upheaval. Moore has a novelist’s eye for suspense and emotional depth, and this unforgettable memoir is full of imaginative, lyrical flights and lush prose. In capturing both the hazy magic and the stark realities of what is becoming an increasingly pervasive experience, Moore shines a light on the great political and personal forces that continue to affect many migrants around the world, and calls us all to acknowledge the tenacious power of love and family. 

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 863 1067 7543
Passcode: 850128

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

This month’s featured reader is Kendra Christel.

Kendra Christel is a writer, actress, and singer from Austin, Texas. She considers herself a Jill of all trades. She began performing at the age of 3 as part of the Joyce Willett Dance Company. She began writing at age 8, winning a college scholarship in an essay contest, and began singing in her church’s adult choir at age 11. An alumna of Texas State University with a B.A. in Mass Communications and Journalism, Kendra served as an E-Board member of the only Black theater group on campus, Ebony Players. Kendra is also an alumna of the University of Georgia, having earned her M.F.A. in Screenwriting. As a Screenwriter, Kendra has placed as a semi-finalist in the Final Draft Big Break screenwriting competition 2020, the Oscar’s Nicholl Fellowship 2021, and the 2nd round of the 2021 Austin Film Festival. Her novel, Abela, was a featured reading at the Diverse Literary Voices of Austin 2019 conference. As an actress and singer, she was also named Broadway World Austin’s Performer of the Decade and Vocalist of the Decade for her role as Deloris Van Cartier in Sister Act. The newest member of the St. Stone family, she enjoys performing drag as a friend of the Royal Court of Austin to help raise money for HIV/AIDS awareness. She currently resides in the Atlanta area.

Zoom Info:
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Meeting ID: 826 8003 2230
Passcode: 171138

Everyone is warmly invited to join us for Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly, informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers (and with a bit of luck the authors themselves might sometimes be able to join us too!)

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

For our November meeting, we’ll be discussing Fantastic Americana: Stories by Josh Rountree.

Travel an American landscape of endless highways, video stores that never close, and lonesome cabins stalked by nightmares. Josh Rountree’s second collection gathers fifteen years of stories, including two originals never before published.

“Josh Rountree is that rarest of creatures, a natural born storyteller. His collection Fantastic Americana: Stories is a total delight, drawing on the myths, the legends, and the music of this land, and weaving them into stories that are uniquely his own. Highly recommended.” —Jaime Lee Moyer, author of Divine Heretic and Brightfall

Josh Rountree writes horror, fantasy, science fiction, and whatever else sounds good at the time. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Realms of Fantasy, Bourbon Penn, PseudoPod, PodCastle, Daily Science Fiction, and A Punk Rock Future. His new short fiction collection, Fantastic Americana: Stories, is available from Fairwood Press. Josh lives in Texas and tweets about records, books, and guitars @josh_rountree.

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Join Zoom meeting:
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Meeting ID: 882 1658 8365
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Join us via Zoom for a reading with Awst Press, featuring authors Donald Quist, Andrew Yoon, and Esteban Rodríguez.

Donald Quist will be reading from a new book of essays, To Those Bounded. Andrew Yoon’s poetry collection We Are Invited to Climb, part of Awst’s “pocket book” collection, came out in September. And local author Esteban Rodriguez recently published a debut essay collection called Before the Earth Devours Us.

Donald Quist is author of Harbors, a Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner and International Book Awards Finalist. He has a linked story collection, For Other Ghosts. His writing has appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and was Notable in Best American Essays 2018. He is creator of the online nonfiction series PAST TEN. Donald has received fellowships from Sundress Academy for the Arts, Kimbilio Fiction, and served as a Gus T. Ridgel fellow for the English PhD program at University of Missouri. He is Director of the MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Andrew Yoon is a New York-based Korean-American artist involved in music, poetry, and computers. Lately he is writing poems that change, making music with paint and dance, live-coding sounds, and leading the Melodica Drone and Bach Orchestra. He is the founder of the arts journal and small press Nothing to Say. As a free culture advocate everything he makes is under copyleft licenses, including this collection.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He currently lives in central Texas.

Zoom Information:
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Meeting ID: 822 8835 4224
Passcode: 186776

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Leticia Urieta’s Las Criaturas. With readings from Leticia Urieta and Sueitko Zamorano-Chavez.

Las Criaturas is a hybrid collection that blends poetic and speculative narrative forms to tell stories of untold women. The poems and short stories play with traditional storytelling forms and tales to ruminate on the monstrous, unruly, vulnerable, strength and beauty in the feminine and seek to reclaim people’s power in powerless situations. The book is broken into three sections to show the multifaceted nature of the word “criatura.” In the story, “The Monster” a child in a migrant detention center is haunted by a monster made of her own fear. In “La Mujer Alacran,” a woman who is sexually assaulted transforms into a literal “scorpion woman” in order to protect herself. In “The Inbetween Mother,” a daughter attempts to reunite her selkie mother with her true form.

Leticia Urieta (she/her/hers) is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a teaching artist in the greater Austin community and a freelance writer. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets, Lumina, The Offing, Kweli Journal, Medium, Electric Lit and others. Her chapbook, The Monster, is out now from LibroMobile Press and her hybrid collection, Las Criaturas, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.

Zoom Info:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83908808756?pwd=bTcwVkRNSjBGZFhjeXJHMndZNlpsQT09

Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. For the next few months we’ll be discussing the work of Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer Clarice Lispector. November’s novel is Água Viva.

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

A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

“This is a fictional account of a woman’s attempt to escape from conventional time and exist instead in a perpetually renewing ‘this instant-now.’ Lispector pursued this same seemingly impossible aim through a number of books—getting closer and closer to the confused and thrilling feeling of fully conscious aliveness. Água Viva is where she succeeds most amazingly.” —Toby Litt, The Guardian

Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer.

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

This meeting will take place 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:
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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:
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Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

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

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.

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Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted soon on Facebook.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.

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

December’s pick is A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own. Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.

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

This month’s featured reader is Maurice Chammah.

Maurice Chammah is a writer and journalist, and the author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, which was published earlier this year. He works for The Marshall Project, a non-profit news outlet that covers the U.S. criminal justice system, where he was on a team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He helps organize The Insider Prize, a contest for incarcerated writers, sponsored by the magazine American Short Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Zoom Info:
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Join us in celebrating the launch of Joshua Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press). Come Clean is the winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was chosen by Carmen Giménez Smith. Joshua will be joined by guest Susan Nguyen.

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and the chapbook, “American Lục Bát for My Mother” (Bull City Press, 2021). He is a queer Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in The Offing, Wildness, The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. He has also been featured on both the “VS” podcast and “The Slowdown”. He is a bubble tea connoisseur and loves a good pun. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.

Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, where she won the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize and fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. In 2018, PBS NewsHour named her one of “three women poets to watch.” Her work appears in diagram, Tin House, and elsewhere. She writes a lot about identity, the body, and the Vietnamese diaspora and also likes to make zines. Her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2021.

Zoom Information:
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Everyone is warmly invited to join us for Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly, informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers (and with a bit of luck the authors themselves might sometimes be able to join us too!)

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

For our December meeting, we’ll be discussing Ghost Daughter by Helen Currie Foster, and the author will be joining us for part of the discussion!

When lawyer Alice MacDonald Greer finds the dead body of her friend and client Ellie Windom at the foot of a staircase, a terrorized horse dancing nearby, she knows trouble’s coming. Serving as executor for her friend’s will means grappling with Ellie’s explosive secrets: a long-lost daughter unknown to her feuding sons and a long-ago lover with enemies of his own.

Alice quickly discovers her friend had a treasure trove of hidden art with questionable history, and the vultures begin to circle. Intruders, carjackers, and greedy heirs all want a seat at the feast. Join Alice as she tries to dodge danger and uncover the murderous truth in a race across Texas and New Mexico (with occasional stops for barbecue).

Award-winning author Helen Currie Foster lives and writes north of Dripping Springs, Texas, in the beloved Hill Country, supervised by three burros. She’s deeply curious about human history and prehistory and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. In her Alice MacDonald Greer mystery novels, small town lawyer Alice must unravel a murder with its roots in the past.

Helen earned a BA from Wellesley College, an MA from the University of Texas, and a JD from the University of Michigan, where she grew fascinated with dirt and water law. After practicing environmental and regulatory litigation for thirty years, she found the character Alice had suddenly appeared. Helen’s active with Austin Shakespeare and Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime, and a member of the Hays County Master Naturalists, still trying to learn her native grasses.

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For over twenty years, the Austin reading for the Texas Poetry Calendar has been the culmination of the fall calendar readings for Texas’ most iconic poets. Join the celebration as poets from across Texas read about the diverse culture, iconography, and geography of our home state. Come share the holiday spirit via Zoom!

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Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. For the next few months we’ll be discussing the work of twentieth-century Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Muriel Spark. December’s novel is The Ballad of Peckham Rye.

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

“Touched with a Satanic glamour, witty and quite perfect in its construction, this light and mock-folkloric novel is the work of an inspired satirist.” —Publishers Weekly

“A jet-black comedy—a wonderful morality tale.” —Bookslut

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is the wickedly farcical tale of an English factory turned upside-down by a Scot who may or may not be in league with the Devil. Hired to do “human research” into the lives of the workers, Dougal Douglas stirs up mayhem.

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific poet, short story writer, essayist, and novelist. She was best known for the satire and artistry of her audacious fictions (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, and The Comforters amongst them). Spark was educated in Edinburgh and later spent some years in Rhodesia. She returned to Great Britain during World War II and wrote propaganda for the Foreign Office. She served as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review from 1947–49. She received numerous awards for her writing, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965, and became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

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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.

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Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

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

January’s selection is Storm by George R. Stewart.

With Storm, first published in 1941, George R. Stewart invented a new genre of fiction: the eco-novel. California has been plunged into drought throughout the summer and fall when a ship reports an unusual barometric reading from the far western Pacific. In San Francisco, a junior meteorologist in the Weather Bureau takes note of the anomaly and plots “an incipient little whorl” on the weather map, a developing storm, he suspects, that he privately dubs Maria. Stewart’s novel tracks Maria’s progress to and beyond the shores of the United States through the eyes of meteorologists, linemen, snowplow operators, a general, a couple of decamping lovebirds, and an unlucky owl, and the storm, surging and ebbing, will bring long-needed rain, flooded roads, deep snows, accidents, and death. Storm is an epic account of humanity’s relationship to and dependence on the natural world.

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

Join Zoom Meeting:
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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.

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Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.

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

January’s pick is The Living is Easy by Dorothy West.

The first novel by Dorothy West—author of The Wedding and the youngest writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance—was one of only a handful to be published by black women during the 1940s. The Living Is Easy tells the story of Cleo Judson, daughter of Southern sharecroppers, determined to integrate into Boston’s black elite. Married to the “Black Banana King” Bart Judson, Cleo maneuvers her three sisters and their children—but not their husbands—into living with her, attempting to recreate her original family in a Bostonian mansion.

Written in elegant and piercing prose, The Living Is Easy is a classic of American literature by a groundbreaking African American woman writer whose work deserves widespread and enduring recognition.

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Meeting ID: 832 1522 9436
Passcode: 471217

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Alex Z. Salinas’ new short story collection, City Lights From the Upside Down. With guest Harold Whit Williams, who will share poems and songs, and a short story from Mel Bay’s Book of the Dead.

In City Lights From the Upside Down, Alex Z. Salinas’ debut collection of short stories, the setting is mostly South Texas—and, infrequently, outer space. Mothers dying or dead, brothers with a taste for revenge, bizarre coffee shop encounters, terrifying dreams, strange alien lights, embers of love blazing and cooling-in these stories, a lot happens and, sometimes, not much at all. Through precise, raw, and often Christ-haunted language, Salinas builds up characters to bring them to their knees. This book: a roller coaster in the middle of the Texas desert. (Or is it just a mirage?)

Alex Z. Salinas is the author of poetry collections WARBLES and DREAMT, or The Lingering Phantoms of Equinox. He’s also the author of a book of stories, City Lights From the Upside Down. He holds an M.A. in English Literature and Language from St. Mary’s University, and lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Harold Whit Williams is a prize-winning poet and longtime guitarist for the indie rock band Cotton Mather. He is the recipient of the 2020 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. The author of five books of poetry, Williams lives in Austin, Texas where he records lo-fi music as Daily Worker and catalogs the KUT Collection for the University of Texas Libraries. Mel Bay’s Book of the Dead is his first book of short stories.

Zoom Information:
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Meeting ID: 851 5320 7722
Passcode: 420598

Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. For the next few months we’ll be discussing the work of twentieth-century Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Muriel Spark. January’s novel is A Far Cry from Kensington.

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

Nancy Hawkins, the majestic narrator of A Far Cry From Kensington, takes us by the hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London, where she spent her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher (“of very good books”) and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington boarding house. She found evil everywhere: shady literary doings and a deadly enemy; anonymous letters; blackmail; and suicide. Looking back on those years from her new perch in Italy, Mrs. Hawkins recounts how that time changed her life forever.

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific poet, short story writer, essayist, and novelist. She was best known for the satire and artistry of her audacious fictions (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, and The Comforters amongst them). Spark was educated in Edinburgh and later spent some years in Rhodesia. She returned to Great Britain during World War II and wrote propaganda for the Foreign Office. She served as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review from 1947–49. She received numerous awards for her writing, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965, and became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

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

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

January’s title is Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris.

Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world’s most cherished pastimes: Gardening! As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris’s poems map the garden as body and the body as garden—her words at home in the phytological and anatomical—like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky’s “80 Flowers.” In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation—spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.

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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.

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Meeting ID: 871 3590 0256
Passcode: 067007

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of two poetry collections from John Sibley Williams: The Drowning House, winner of The Elixir Press Poetry Award, and Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, winner of The Cider Press Review Book Award. With guests Chloe Martinez and Esteban Rodriguez.

“In The Drowning House, John Sibley Williams grapples with ghosts, the predators outside and in, those closer than our own hearts. In American landscapes haunted by nooses and wolves, burning crosses and floods, Williams holds a light before his path. These are keen-edged poems, kneeling before us, asking forgiveness for what our ancestors have done and have had to live through. He offers himself as a sacrifice for our sins: ‘here, love, is the tree of my body // to learn to climb. Far from here. From me. To touch / whatever’s still up there, beautifully above us.'” —Philip Metres

“With an impressive mastery of sound matched only by his alchemical imagery, Williams guides readers along mythic highways, above oceans, and towards the reimagining of a bridge no one remembers. To conjure is a recurring theme in this impressive collection—as if language holds the power to reconfigure a past, a mother, a child. And perhaps it can. Williams’ words are that convincing. Recasting home as conch shell, as ghost house, and as fire, we learn that we are held together by the tensile strength of our own narrative. I’ve circled and underlined lines on nearly every poem in Scale Model of a Country at Dawn. This is a book you’ll want to read, and then turn to the first poem to enter again. Even if no one is safe from the wolves in our hearts, John Sibley Williams helps us live within these contradictions.” —Susan Rich

John Sibley Williams is the author of four award-winning poetry collections: The Drowning House, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, As One Fire Consumes Another, and Skin Memory. A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of Caesura Poetry Workshop.

Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Common, Shenandoah and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He currently lives in central Texas.

Zoom Information:
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Meeting ID: 876 7501 4021
Passcode: 817232

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

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

February’s selection is Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, in a new translation from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie.

Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.

Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

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

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Join us in celebrating Kallisto Gaia Press’ joint release of two new chapbooks: How to Identify Yourself with a Wound by Austin poet KB, winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize; and a new collection, Motherboard, from a Saguaro Poetry Prize finalist, Vermont poet Renee Rossi.

“The poems in How to Identify Yourself with a Wound pull no punches. Raw honesty paired with concise language inhabit and fully embody a life shaped by the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender. This is my favorite kind of poetry, necessary and urgent, revealing and saving and healing and re-creating both poet and reader.” —ire’ne lara silva, judge, 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize

KB is a Black queer nonbinary miracle. They are the author of HOW TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF WITH A WOUND (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) and Freedom House (Deep Vellum, 2023). KB is a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow and has words published in Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere.

“Motherboard possesses a compelling voice that moves you from awe at the abundant beauty of the natural world and transcendent life moments to a strange fear of how vulnerable our happinesses are, how changeable the world is. And yet, the poet’s voice is sure and strong, negotiating the changing terrain of our lives.” —ire’ne lara silva, judge, 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize

Renée Rossi has published the full-length poetry collection, TRIAGE, and two chapbooks: THIRD Worlds and STILL LIFE, winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize. A native of Detroit, she currently divides her time between the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and other places that she finds compelling.

Zoom Information:

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.

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

February’s pick is Shock Treatment: Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition by Karen Finley.

“Finley’s Shock Treatment is more than just ‘art.’ It remains a searing and necessary indictment of America, a call to arms, a great protest against the injustices waged on queers and women during a time in recent American history where government intervention and recognition was so desperately needed. Twenty-five years on, Finley’s work continues to shock and provoke readers and audiences, demonstrating the powerful cultural and political impact her work has had on modern American art and performance art.” —Nathan Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Karen Finley is an iconoclast who, ironically, became an icon when her work in Shock Treatment was targeted by right wing politicians. This important book is as necessary and vital today as it was twenty-five years ago.” –Sapphire, author of Push

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Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. This month’s featured reader is Dalia Azim.

Dalia Azim was born in Canada and raised in the United States. Her 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, and The Washington Post, among other places. Her first book, Country of Origin, will be published by A Strange Object/Deep Vellum in March 2022. Dalia is the manager of special projects at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas; she previously worked as a researcher at the Dedalus Foundation and as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City. She graduated with a dual degree in art and literature from Stanford University and grew up in Colorado.

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

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

For our February meeting, we’ll be discussing Ursula Pike’s An Indian Among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir, and Ursula will be joining us for part of the discussion!

When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, “knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.” In the following two years, as a series of dramatic episodes brought that tension to boiling point, she began to ask: what does it mean to have experienced the effects of colonialism firsthand, and yet to risk becoming a colonizing force in turn?

An Indian among los Indígenas, Pike’s memoir of this experience, upends a canon of travel memoirs that has historically been dominated by white writers. It is a sharp, honest, and unnerving examination of the shadows that colonial history casts over even the most well-intentioned attempts at cross-cultural aid. It is also the debut of an exceptionally astute writer with a mastery of deadpan wit. It signals a shift in travel writing that is long overdue.

Ursula Pike is the author of An Indian among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir (2021) from Heyday Books. Ursula lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches creative writing at Austin Community College. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a member of the Karuk Tribe. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Yellow Medicine Review, Ligeia Magazine, World Literature Today, and KUT radio’s O’Dark 30.

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Join Zoom meeting:
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Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. For the next few months we’ll be discussing the work of twentieth-century Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Muriel Spark. February’s novel is Memento Mori.

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

Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age.

In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled, and many an old unsavory secret is dusted off.

“This funny and macabre book has delighted me as much as any novel that I have read since the war.” —Graham Greene

“Acidly funny: a marvelously crafted, tautly written novel.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific poet, short story writer, essayist, and novelist. She was best known for the satire and artistry of her audacious fictions (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, and The Comforters amongst them). Spark was educated in Edinburgh and later spent some years in Rhodesia. She returned to Great Britain during World War II and wrote propaganda for the Foreign Office. She served as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review from 1947–49. She received numerous awards for her writing, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965, and became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

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

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

February’s title is The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell.

Named a Library Reads Pick, Apple Books’ Best Book, Powells’ Pick, Amazon Fiction & Literature’s “Best of the Month,” The Millions’ Top Ten Book of the Month, and one of CrimeReads’ and Oprah Daily’s Best Historical Novels of 2021

London, 1893: high up in a house on a dark, snowy night, a lone seamstress stands by a window. So begins the swirling, serpentine world of Paraic O’Donnell’s Victorian-inspired mystery, the story of a city cloaked in shadow, but burning with questions: why does the seamstress jump from the window? Why is a cryptic message stitched into her skin? And how is she connected to a rash of missing girls, all of whom seem to have disappeared under similar circumstances?

On the case is Inspector Cutter, a detective as sharp and committed to his work as he is wryly hilarious. Gideon Bliss, a Cambridge dropout in love with one of the missing girls, stumbles into a role as Cutter’s sidekick. And clever young journalist Octavia Hillingdon sees the case as a chance to tell a story that matters—despite her employer’s preference that she stick to a women’s society column. As Inspector Cutter peels back the mystery layer by layer, he leads them all, at last, to the secrets that lie hidden at the house on Vesper Sands.

By turns smart, surprising, and impossible to put down, The House on Vesper Sands offers a glimpse into the strange undertow of late nineteenth-century London and the secrets we all hold inside us.

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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.

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Meeting ID: 880 7807 4208
Passcode: 818299

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the Austin launch of E.C. Belli’s second collection, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep (Anhinga Press), winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. With readings from E.C. Belli, Sam Ross, Safiya Sinclair, and Diana Khoi Nguyen.

“When Sappho was asked to define beauty, she answered ‘Some people say it’s a herd of black horses in the grass, some people say it’s a fleet of warships leaving the harbor. I say beauty is whatever you love.’ Reading E.C. Belli’s sensational A Sleep That is Not Our Sleep, I kept thinking of that bit of Sappho, thinking of Belli’s remarkable affinity for rendering with precision and acuity what is beloved, what is lovable, and what is unloved but worthy of it. One page reads, in its entirety, ‘little clavicle bone, you grew // things grow well in me.’ The verse odes the beauty of a bone, yes, but also the beauty of a self capable of growing and sustaining what it’s made. In this collection, stones whisper in the night, eyes mend into dials. The poem ‘Hues’ is worth the sticker price alone. To say it simply: Belli has written a singular collection, one I’ll be learning from for years.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell

E.C. Belli is a bilingual poet and translator. Her second book, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep, was selected by Cathy Park Hong to be winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry (Anhinga Press, 2022). Her debut collection of poems, Objects of Hunger, is winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019). Her translation of I, Little Asylum, a short novel by Emmanuelle Guattari, was released by Semiotext(e) for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and The Nothing Bird, her translation of some selected poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd, appeared with Oberlin College Press (2013). She is the recipient of a 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and her work has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, AGNI, and FIELD. Work in French has appeared in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle and PO&SIE (France), among others. She is the author of the chapbook plein jeu.

Sam Ross is the author of Company, winner of the Four Way Book Levis Prize in Poetry and the 2020 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Tin House, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and other publications, and he has received support from Columbia University School of the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is also a painter.

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK. Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Civitella Rainieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her memoir, How to Say Babylon, is forthcoming in 2023 from Simon & Schuster.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. This spring 2022, she is an artist-in-residence at Brown University.

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Meeting ID: 829 3604 3761
Passcode: 703398

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Maria Wells’ Images in the Clouds: Reading the Sky.

“These poems have personal integrity and are both deeply felt and clearly voiced, always welcome in any art.” —Kurt Heinzelman, Professor Emeritus of Poetry and Poetics, The University of Texas at Austin

A combination of sixty poems and ten color illustrations, Images in the Clouds carries the reader forward and back in time, to inner and outer worlds. Taken from Wells’ treasure trunk of a life of adventure and world travel, some verses share memories of places and people, while some delight with pure fantasy and imagination.

A Fulbright Scholar and Doctoral graduate from the University of Pisa, Maria Xenia Wells Zevelechi spent her career at the University of Texas at Austin. After retiring from academia, she embraced poetry. Inspired by a friend’s painting, her first poem was “Memories in Silver,” written in Paris, at a meeting of Poets and Writers. A member of the Austin Poetry Society, she gives readings in Austin, Paris, and Greece. Her civic and cultural participation has included an active role in the Sierra Club, President of the Board of Director of Salon Concerts, member of the Fundraiser and Scholarship Committee for Zonta International Association of Business and Professional Women, and member of the Leadership Circle of Austin PBS. With two daughters, five grandchildren, and the memory of a loving husband, she lives in Austin, Texas.

Zoom Information:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88658006464?pwd=Tm5oV1VPV1YzQWx1UWJqanZ3ZFRKUT09

Meeting ID: 886 5800 6464
Passcode: 341837

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:
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Meeting ID: 868 4225 6767
Passcode: 100539

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the release of Tomás Q. Morín’s new memoir, Let Me Count the Ways. Laura Marris, translator of the new edition of Camus’ The Plague—the first new translation of The Plague to be published in the United States in more than seventy years—will join as well.

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

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Yale Review, The Believer, The Point, and elsewhere. Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget, and To Live Is to Resist, a biography of Antonio Gramsci. With Alice Kaplan, she is the co-author of States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (forthcoming in fall 2022). She is currently at work on her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, which will be published by Graywolf in 2024.

Zoom Info:
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Meeting ID: 899 4412 5202
Passcode: 587107

Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary! Everyone is welcome to attend and join in the discussion, but please be aware that we intend this club to be a welcoming, safe place that focuses on women’s words and experiences.

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

March’s pick is The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez.

This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who shares the blood by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story.

“The Gilda Stories was ahead of its time when it was first published in 1991, and this anniversary edition reminds us why it’s still an important novel. Gomez’s characters are rooted in historical reality yet lift seductively out of it, to trouble traditional models of family, identity, and literary genre and imagine for us bold new patterns. A lush, exciting, inspiring read.” —Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet

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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.

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Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. For the next few months we’ll be discussing the work of twentieth-century Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Muriel Spark. March’s novel, our final Spark pick, is The Driver’s Seat.

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

The Driver’s Seat, Spark’s own favorite among her many novels, was hailed by the New Yorker as “her spiny and treacherous masterpiece.”

Driven mad by an office job, Lise leaves everything and flies south on holiday in search of passionate adventure. In this metaphysical shocker, infinity and eternity attend Lise’s last terrible day in the unnamed southern city that is her final destination…

“A masterpiece. No one could read it and mistake its force. Only Muriel Spark would have dreamed of writing it. The book’s near-jaunty tone would, in some fictional universes, be at odds with its jet-black content. In Spark-world, they go together, like murderer and victim.”
—John Lanchester

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific poet, short story writer, essayist, and novelist. She was best known for the satire and artistry of her audacious fictions (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, and The Comforters amongst them). Spark was educated in Edinburgh and later spent some years in Rhodesia. She returned to Great Britain during World War II and wrote propaganda for the Foreign Office. She served as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review from 1947–49. She received numerous awards for her writing, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965, and became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

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

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

March’s title is Allmen and the Dragonflies by Martin Suter.

A thrilling art heist escapade infused with European high culture and luxury that doesn’t shy away from the darker side of human nature.

Johann Friedrich von Allmen, a bon vivant of dandified refinement, has exhausted his family fortune by living in Old World grandeur despite present-day financial constraints. Forced to downscale, Allmen inhabits the garden house of his former Zurich estate, attended by his Guatemalan butler, Carlos. When not reading novels by Balzac and Somerset Maugham, he plays jazz on a Bechstein baby grand. Allmen’s fortunes take a sharp turn when he meets a stunning blonde whose lakeside villa contains five Art Nouveau bowls created by renowned French artist Émile Gallé and decorated with a dragonfly motif. Allmen, pressured to pay off mounting debts, absconds with the priceless bowls and embarks on a high-risk, potentially violent bid to cash them in. This is the first of a series of humorous, fast-paced detective novels devoted to a memorable gentleman thief who, with his trusted sidekick Carlos, creates an investigative firm to recover missing precious objects.

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 833 9375 3158
Passcode: 659775

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. This month’s featured reader is Adam Soto.

Adam Soto is the author of the novel This Weightless World. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently lives with his wife in Austin, Texas, where he is a teacher and the web editor of American Short Fiction. His second book, a collection of ghost stories entitled Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep, will be released this fall.

Zoom Info:

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Meeting ID: 879 6988 5873
Passcode: 648283

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:
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Meeting ID: 876 4504 3485
Passcode: 988346

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

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:
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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:
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Meeting ID: 869 9831 2890
Passcode: 206641

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. This month’s featured reader is Scott Semegran.

Scott Semegran is an award-winning writer of eight books. BlueInk Review described him best as “a gifted writer, with a wry sense of humor.” His latest novel, The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island, is about four middle school friends who sneak away to an abandoned lake house to evade the wrath of high school bullies, only to become stranded on the lake’s desolate island. It won First Place in the 2021 Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards for Middle-Grade/Young Adult Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, four kids, two cats, and a dog. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in English.

Zoom Info:

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Meeting ID: 869 1031 6763
Passcode: 360355

Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. For the next few months we’ll be discussing the work of Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist Roberto Bolaño. April’s title is Nazi Literature in the Americas, translated by Chris Andrews.

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

Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño’s books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.

Born in Santiago, Chile, Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968. He went back to Chile in 1973 to “help build socialism” (as he wrote in his story “Dance Card”), but less than a month after his return Pinochet seized power. Bolaño was arrested and imprisoned in Concepción. After his release, he returned to Mexico before moving to Paris and then on to Barcelona. Bolaño has been acclaimed as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag), “a spellbinder” (Newsweek), and “never less than mesmerizing” (Los Angeles Times). Winner of many prizes, including the Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, Bolaño wrote ten novels, two collections of short stories and five books of poetry before he died at the age of 50, on July 15, 2003.

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

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

April’s title is Waltz Into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich.

When New Orleans coffee merchant Louis Durand first meets his bride-to-be after a months-long courtship by mail, he’s shocked that she doesn’t match the photographs sent with her correspondence. But Durand has told his own fibs, concealing from her the details of his wealth, and so he mostly feels fortunate to find her so much more beautiful than expected. Soon after they marry, however, he becomes increasingly convinced that the woman in his life is not the same woman with whom he exchanged letters, a fact that becomes unavoidable when she suddenly disappears with his fortune. Alone, desperate, and inexplicably love-sick, Louis quickly descends into madness, obsessed with finding Julia and bringing her to justice—and simply with seeing her again. He engages the services of a private detective to do so, embarking on a search that spans the southeast of the country. When he finally tracks her down, the nightmare truly begins…

A dark tale of the destructive power of love, Waltz into Darkness is a classic “femme fatale” narrative that shows “the father of the modern suspense story” (LA Times) at the top of his unsettling craft. It has been adapted for film twice, most notably serving as the basis for Francois Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid.

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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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.

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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: