Welcome to Malvern Books!
Malvern Books is now closed. Malvern Books was a bookstore and community space in Austin, Texas. We specialized in visionary literature and poetry from independent publishers, with a focus on lesser-known and emerging voices.
An Update from the Manager of Malvern Books
Dear Friends,
We’ve had a wonderful time sharing our favorite books with you over the past nine years, and it’s been an honor to celebrate the work of so many brilliant writers through our readings and events.
Malvern Books is the realization of Joe Bratcher’s vision—Joe dreamt of a bookstore that would carry the books he loved, mostly poetry and fiction from small, independent presses. He wanted to promote writers and translators of books from other countries, while also championing the work of local writers.
When Joe first talked to me about opening Malvern Books, I must admit I was skeptical. I didn’t think we’d find an audience. It was 2012 and everyone was saying that bookstores were dead, Kindle and online shopping were the future. I anticipated many quiet sales days, with Joe and I just sitting there, looking at each other. He told me if that’s how it ended up, well, at least we’d have a chance to chat—and since we always seemed to laugh a lot when we talked, it sounded like a good way to spend some time. And so from then on, whenever we’d have a really slow sales day, with just a few people coming in, we’d look at each other and say, “We’re living the dream!” and we’d laugh.
But back to opening… in early 2013, with the help of our amazing architect, contractor, and interior designer, we created the space that Joe had in mind. We started posting on social media thanks to Tracey, our wonderful digital media manager and first Malvern hire. And we were so grateful to the many enthusiastic writers and readers who expressed their excitement at the imminent arrival of Malvern Books. From the very beginning it felt like we were building a community.
We opened our doors in October 2013, and we were shocked by how many people came by. You showed up and you loved what we had to offer! You constantly surprised and humbled us with your kind words and helpful suggestions. People from out of town would visit the store because a local friend had told them they had to come by, and we received much appreciated shout-outs from the Austin Chronicle and numerous other newspapers and journals.
And then 2020 hit—but even with the pandemic, we had loyal customers who came by for curbside pick ups, signed up for individual shopping appointments, and participated in our Zoom book clubs and events. If we didn’t say it enough, THANK YOU!
All along the way, we were lucky enough to have truly wonderful staff members who loved the books we carried and who helped us build the store we have now. Their work has been invaluable and we could not have done this without them.
On July 28th of this year, we lost Joe. I can’t tell you how hard it has been to try and carry on in this space without him. Our little Malvern world has not been the same since, and, as much as we love this store and our amazing customers, Malvern Books simply cannot continue without our Joe.
Malvern Books will be closing on December 31st, 2022. It has been a wonderful nine years and we thank each and every one of our cherished customers, friends, staff, and suppliers for helping us along the way.
As we move forward, we’ll be sharing our plans with you for sales and specials. For now, we just wanted to let you know this was coming. We hope you all continue to seek out works in translation and books published by small presses—there is so much great stuff out there—and that you continue to support our local independent bookstores, like our dear friends at BookWoman, among others. But, most importantly, we hope to see you in the store sometime soon, to say goodbye and to thank you, both for being the readers that you are and because you have come with us on this incredibly fulfilling journey in Joe’s world.
With heartfelt thanks and wishing you all the best,
Becky Garcia,
Manager, Malvern Books
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo.
In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a “magician and a master” (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
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 month’s selection is Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi.
“This novel is a masterpiece. From the opening sentences, he is drawing on nuance and subtle detail; comedy and pathos. Every gesture speaks volumes…..for all the humour and the easy comedy this lively study of small life is as profound as a prayer, as subtle as a lament.” —The Irish Times
It is 1900, give or take a few years. The Vajkays live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house. Both are utterly enthralled with their daughter, Skylark. Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives.
Now Skylark is going away, for one week only, it’s true, but a week that yawns endlessly for her parents. What will they do? Before they know it, they are eating at restaurants, reconnecting with old friends, attending the theater. And this is just a prelude to Father’s night out at the Panther Club, about which the less said the better. Drunk, in the light of dawn Father surprises himself and Mother with his true, buried, unspeakable feelings about Skylark. Then, Skylark is back…
Is there a world beyond the daily grind and life’s creeping disappointments? Kosztolányi’s crystalline prose, perfect comic timing, and profound human sympathy conjure up a tantalizing beauty that lies on the far side of the ordinary. To that extent, Skylark is nothing less than a magical book.
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.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is muted blood by mónica teresa ortiz.
To read mónica teresa ortiz’s muted blood, we unwrap our depleted ear, we open space and breath for our unruly ones, we write letters into the future and underneath the surface with our dearly beloved poet ghosts. This is a poetry which defies demarcated boundaries, which demands deep listening and honoring of the dead, which celebrates our small sweet bursts of joy. —Ching-In Chen
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
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 month’s selection is The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell.
This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.
“A literary jewel of eccentricity seen as an ethical provocation, which created an unforgettable shock at a time when the mental stereotype imposed by the dictatorship was dimly trying to find the first slits for a breakthrough….The writer summons, in an artistic undertaking that is ever vigorous and vibrant, the fundamental questions of existence, the ephemeral and the transcendent stimulating each other in a dynamic exchange of energy, with original and seductive accords of lasting resonance.” —Norman Manea
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.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
We’d like to invite you to join our brand-new Suspense & Speculation Book Club, a group for those of you interested in reading and discussing our mystery, suspense, and sci-fi/fantasy titles.
Our very first book will be Christopher Brown’s Rule of Capture, the first volume in an explosive legal thriller series set in the dystopian world of Brown’s Tropic of Kansas.
“Christopher Brown looks to be cornering the market on future dystopias… Rule of Capture is not just sci-fi, it’s also a legal thriller. Its author is himself a lawyer, just like John Grisham, and he has a grip on detail that full-time sci-fi authors can’t match.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A legal thriller set in a bureaucratic dystopia as grim as anything imagined by J.G. Ballard or William Gibson.”—Texas Monthly
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on Sunday, January 12th, at 1pm.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Scorpionic Sun by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, translated by Conor Bracke.
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles.
“Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s poems speak from 1969 to the present with urgency, through an explosively anachronistic act of translation by Conor Bracken. As Khaïr-Eddine writes in ‘Black Nausea,’ the poems ‘offer to the future this weird / fruit / which speaks in the mouths / of the thousands of innocents dead / in our black blood.’ The distortive energies of Khaïr-Eddine’s ‘linguistic guerilla war’ agitate for a politically convulsive poetry that dares to be strange, spastic and abjectly sublime. This is a return of a political surrealism when its convulsive bloom is most needed.” —Johannes Göransson
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
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 month’s selection is Red Shift by Alan Garner.
In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.
Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as Mow Cop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe: all these come together in Alan Garner’s extraordinary Red Shift, a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening and destructive madness.
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.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
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 month’s title is Dread Journey by Dorothy B. Hughes.
Dread Journey is a taut thriller that exemplifies Dorothy B. Hughes’s greatest strengths as a writer—namely, her sharpened prose and mastery of psychological suspense. While its fine-tuned plot is just as exciting as it was in 1945, when the novel was first published, and its portrayal of Hollywood’s less savory elements remains all-too-relevant today, the book’s characters and setting provide pure Golden Age fare, sure to please any devotee of classic mystery novels.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on Sunday, February 9th.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Claire Bowman, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Advantages of Being Evergreen by Oliver Baez Bendorf.
Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf’s remarkable Advantages of Being Evergreen is an essential book for our time and for all time… Baez Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. I am living for the world these poems anticipate… This is a book of the earth’s abiding wonder. And the body’s unbreakable ability to bloom. —Gabrielle Calvocoressi
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
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 month’s selection is A King Alone by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Alyson Waters.
A King Alone is set in a remote Alpine village that is cut off from the world by rugged mountains and by long months when the ground is covered with snow and the heavens with cloud. One such winter, villagers begin mysteriously to disappear. Soon the village is paralyzed by terror, which gives way to relief and eager anticipation when the outsider Langlois arrives to investigate. What he discovers, however, will leave no one reassured, and his reappearance in the village a few years later, now assigned the task of guarding it from wolves, awakens those troubling memories. A man of few words, a regal manner, and military efficiency, Langlois baffles and fascinates the villagers, whose different responses to him shape Jean Giono’s increasingly charged narrative. This novel about a tiny community at the dangerous edge of things and a man of law who is a man alone could be described as a metaphysical Western. It unfolds with the uncanny inevitability and disturbing intensity of a dream.
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.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!
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 month’s title is Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban.
In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research…
Reviewers have compared Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter—how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on Sunday, March 8th.
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.
*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com. The book can be purchased via our online store here. ***
This month’s title is Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin.
Victor Pelevin’s novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: “full of the ridiculous and the sublime,” says The Observer. Omon is chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program, the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. However, he enrolls only to encounter the terrifying absurdity of Soviet protocol and its backward technology: a bicycle-powered moonwalker; the outrageous Colonel Urgachin (“a kind of Soviet Dr. Strangelove”—New York Times); and a one-way assignment to the moon. The New Yorker proclaimed: “Omon’s adventure is like a rocket firing off its various stages — each incident is more jolting and propulsively absurd than the one before.”
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.
*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will most likely take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com. ***
This month’s selection is The Alternation, Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history. This book can be purchased online via our BookShop site: https://bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590176177.
In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice.
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.
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.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.
This month’s title is All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman.
“One of the saddest, funniest, strangest, and most romantic books. . . . Brilliant!” —The Bookseller
“All Tom’s friends really are superheroes. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, Perf is hypnotized by her ex-boyfriend, Hypno, to believe Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, the Perfectionist is sure Tom has abandoned her, so she’s moving away. With no idea Tom’s beside her, she boards a plane. Tom has until they land to make her see him…”
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Claire Bowman, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.
This month’s title is Whale and Vapor by Kim Kyung Ju.
The poems in Whale and Vapor emphasize exhaustion—physically, mentally, and as an existential condition. Kim Kyung Ju playfully turns toward the lyric in this work as a way to reconcile himself with the contemporary world by engaging in dialogue with his Korean literary ancestry. Masterfully translated by Jake Levine in close conversation with the author, this collection by one of the most popular and critically acclaimed poets to come out in South Korea in the new millennium explores the cold tunnels of today’s tired, dark times.
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.
*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will most likely take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***
This month’s selection is Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships. Please note: we’ll discuss parts 1 and 2 in June (approx. 240 pages) and parts 3 and 4 in July (approx. 250 pages). This book can be purchased online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590173466.
Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships resurrects the fantastic world of the tenth century AD when the Vikings roamed and rampaged from the northern fastnesses of Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean. Bengtsson’s hero, Red Orm—canny, courageous, and above all lucky—is only a boy when he is abducted from his Danish home by the Vikings and made to take his place at the oars of their dragon-prowed ships. Orm is then captured by the Moors in Spain, where he is initiated into the pleasures of the senses and fights for the Caliph of Cordova. Escaping from captivity, Orm washes up in Ireland, where he marvels at those epicene creatures, the Christian monks, and from which he then moves on to play an ever more important part in the intrigues of the various Scandinavian kings and clans and dependencies . . . Packed with pitched battles and blood feuds and told throughout with wit and high spirits, Bengtsson’s book is a splendid adventure that features one of the most unexpectedly winning heroes in modern fiction.
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.
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.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.
This month’s title is César Aira’s Dinner, described as “a literary zombie tale”:
One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother dine with a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors. They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old windup toys and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to watch some late night TV before retiring. The news quickly takes a turn for the worse as, horrified, the newscaster finds herself reporting about the dead rising from their graves, leaving the cemetery, and sucking the blood of the living—all somehow, disturbingly reminiscent of the dinner party.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.
This month’s title is A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton.
Alfred Starr Hamilton ‘wrote to the governor of poetry / And simply signed [his] own name.’ Consider this collection assembled by two very dedicated allographers an essential expansion on said letter. People who’ve encountered Hamilton’s work previously will be glad for the chance to see familiar poems alongside many marvelous new ones. And how I envy first-time readers of this most generous and genuine American writer. —Graham Foust
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.
*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will most likely take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***
This month’s selection is parts 3 and 4 of Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships (we discussed parts 1 and 2 in June). This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590173466.
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.
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.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.
This month’s title is Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, which Zadie Smith called “an idiosyncratic and fascinating novel.”
Hawthorn and his partner, Child, are called to the scene of a mysterious shooting in North London. The only witness is unreliable, the clues are scarce, and the victim, a young man who lives nearby, swears he was shot by a ghost car. While Hawthorn battles with fatigue and strange dreams, the crime and the narrative slip from his grasp and the stories of other Londoners take over: a young pickpocket on the run from his boss; an editor in possession of a disturbing manuscript; a teenage girl who spends her days at the Tate Modern; and a madman who has been infected by former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Haunting these disparate lives is the shadowy figure of Mishazzo, an elusive crime magnate who may be running the city, or may not exist at all.
* * *
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We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us regarding curbside pick up.
On Saturday, July 25th at 1pm we’ll be discussing A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib.
Hanif Abdurraqib is donating 100% of the 2020 royalties from this book to theokraproject.com, a collective that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people by bringing home-cooked, healthy, and culturally specific meals and resources to Black Trans People.
In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It’s a book about a mother’s death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author’s black friends wanted to listen to ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’ It’s about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor’s dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.
* * *
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.
*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will most likely take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***
This month’s selection is The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart, translated from the French by Barbara Bray. This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590176801.
This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the adversities of a peasant community, the ecstasies of love, and domestic realities while arriving at her own precious happiness. In the words of Toussine, the wise, tender grandmother who raises her, “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.” A masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond relates the triumph of a generous and hopeful spirit, while offering a gorgeously lush, imaginative depiction of the flora, landscape, and customs of Guadeloupe. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.
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:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
One tap mobile:
+13462487799,,2829783950#,,,,0#,,788597# US (Houston)
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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.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.
This month’s title is NVK by Temple Drake.
Set in the otherworldly megalopolis that is today’s Shanghai, Temple Drake’s suspenseful first novel blends the gothic, the erotic, and the supernatural as it charts an intense and dangerous affair. Written in spare, high-octane prose, NVK is the first in a series of dark, hypnotic novels that explore the roots of desire and the cruel costs of immortality.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
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+13462487799,,2829783950#,,,,0#,,788597# US (Houston)
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbigMUsjuS
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us regarding curbside pick up.
On Saturday, August 22nd at 1pm we’ll be discussing A Treatise on Stars by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
A Treatise on Stars extends Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”
* * *
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.
*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***
This month’s selection is Free Day by Inès Cagnati, translated by Liesl Schillinger. This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781681373584.
In the marshy countryside of southwestern France, fourteen-year-old Galla rides her battered bicycle twenty miles, twice a month, from the high school she attends on scholarship back to her family’s rocky, barren farm. Galla’s loving, overwhelmed mother would prefer she stay at home, where Galla can look after her neglected little sisters and defuse her father’s brutal rages. What does this dutiful daughter owe her family, and what does she owe her own ambition? In Inès Cagnati’s haunting and visually powerful novel Free Day, winner of the 1973 Prix Roger Nimier, Galla makes an extra journey one frigid winter Saturday to surprise her mother. As she anticipates their reunion, she mentally retraces the crooked path of her family’s past and the more recent map of her school life as a poor but proud student. Galla’s dense interior monologue blends with the landscape around her, building a powerful portrait of a girl who yearns to liberate herself from the circumstances that confine her, without losing their ties to her heart.
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:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
One tap mobile:
+13462487799,,2829783950#,,,,0#,,788597# US (Houston)
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbigMUsjuS
Everyone is warmly invited to join us for the inaugural gathering of our brand-new book club, 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!)
For our first meeting, we’ll be discussing Scott Semegran’s Sammie & Budgie, a quirky, mystical tale of a self-doubting IT nerd and his young son, who possesses the gift of foresight.
The novel’s delights abound… Semegran is a gifted writer, with a wry sense of humor. Poignant, yet never maudlin, this novel will appeal to literary-minded readers and fans of magical realism. —BlueInk Review, starred review
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2829783950?pwd=NHROdVlSWFljYk5OelJQdzFudTZ3dz09
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Passcode: 788597
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.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here.
This month’s title is Everything Under by Daisy Johnson.
In this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth, Daisy Johnson explores questions of fate and free will, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships. Everything Under—a debut novel whose surreal, watery landscape will resonate with fans of Fen—is a daring, moving story that will leave you unsettled and unstrung.
“It takes a bold mind to steer so many elements through one tale, and an even stronger stylist to render them in a narrative that heeds, but seems not to, the laws of nature. Johnson has done all this in a book that will probably be read, like Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, for years to come as a part of the reclaiming of narrative territory.” —The Boston Globe
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
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We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, 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 email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us regarding curbside pick up. (The copies we have at the store are hardcover and we are offering a 20% discount on them.)
On Saturday, September 26th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Dunce by Mary Ruefle.
“These poems grace the readers with wonder, wisdom, and whim . . . securing Ruefle’s reputation among poets as the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
In Dunce Mary Ruefle returns to the poetic practice that has always been at her core. With her startlingly fresh sensibility, she enraptures us in poem after poem by the intensity of her attention, with the imaginative flourishes of her being-in-the-world, always deep with mysteries, unexpected appearances, and abiding yearning.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
One tap mobile:
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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.
*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***
This month’s selection is Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner. This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590173169.
Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes…
Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.
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:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
One tap mobile:
+13462487799,,2829783950#,,,,0#,,788597# US (Houston)
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbigMUsjuS
Everyone is warmly invited to join us for our newest book club, 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!)
For our second meeting, we’ll be discussing Chaitali Sen’s The Pathless Sky, a haunting and moving novel that will appeal to readers who enjoyed Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. Chaitali will be joining us at some point during the discussion, so we can chat with her about this wonderful book and her writing career.
In The Pathless Sky, Chaitali Sen conjures a world in which a nation’s political turmoil, its secret history, and growing social unrest turn life into a fragile and capricious thing and love into a necessary refuge to be defended at all cost. A world, that is, not unlike the one we live in. John, a hapless young student with a potentially brilliant academic career ahead of him, and Mariam, a shy, preternaturally perceptive woman from the north, fall in love in college. Their early careers, their seemingly mismatched natures, and the alarming changes occurring in their country conspire to keep them apart for years. But a day comes when, across a great distance, both realize that they have always loved each other. During the intervening years, however, the troubles in their country have reached a critical impasse. Government crimes have been whitewashed, personal liberty is deeply compromised, a resistance movement has emerged from the underground to take the fight for freedom to the streets, and the government militia employs increasingly draconian measures in an attempt to maintain control.
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2829783950?pwd=NHROdVlSWFljYk5OelJQdzFudTZ3dz09
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Passcode: 788597
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.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.
This month’s title is Chercher La Femme by L. Timmel Duchamp.
They named the planet La Femme and called it a paradise and refused to leave it. Now Julia 9561 is heading up the mission to retrieve the errant crew and establish meaningful Contact with the inhabitants. Are the inhabitants really all female, as the first crew claimed? Why don’t the men want to return to Earth? What happened to the women on the crew? And why did Paul 22423 warn the First Council to send only male crew members?
“There’s some interesting tidal stirring going on at the more cerebral levels of modern SF, which I think began with books like A Voyage to Arcturus and Solaris. It’s now manifesting itself in, for example, Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach books and in this book, Chercher La Femme, as well as in films like Arrival, They Remain, and of course Annihilation. Human bafflement and consternation characterize these stories in the face of the most alien kind of alien-ness we can imagine at this point, and a necessary softening and yielding of our age-old infatuation with a propulsive, often violent drive to control (or kill) whatever is ineffable and strange to us.” —Suzy McKee Charnas, author of The Vampire Tapestry and the Holdfast Chronicles
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
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We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, 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 email becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us regarding curbside pick up. (The copies we have at the store are hardcover and we are offering a 20% discount on them.)
On Saturday, October 24th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Time by Etel Adnan.
On October 27, 2003, Etel Adnan received a post card of a palm tree from the poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies in Tunisia, sparking a collection of poems that would unspool over the next decade in a continuous discovery of the present moment. Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments, then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
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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.
*** Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***
This month’s selection is Malicroix by Henri Bosco, translated from the French by Joyce Zonana. This book can be purchased from our store (call us for curbside pick up!) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781681374109.
Henri Bosco, like his contemporary Jean Giono, is one of the regional masters of modern French literature, a writer who dwells above all on the grandeur, beauty, and ferocious unpredictability of the natural world. Malicroix, set in the early nineteenth century, is widely considered to be Bosco’s greatest book. Here he invests a classic coming-of-age story with a wild, mythic glamour.
A nice young man, of stolidly unimaginative, good bourgeois stock, is surprised to inherit a house on an island in the Rhône, in the famously desolate and untamed region of the Camargue. The terms of his great-uncle’s will are even more surprising: the young man must take up solitary residence in the house for a full three months before he will be permitted to take possession of it. With only a taciturn shepherd and his dog for occasional company, he finds himself surrounded by the huge and turbulent river (always threatening to flood the island and surrounding countryside) and the wind, battering at his all-too-fragile house, shrieking from on high. And there is another condition of the will, a challenging task he must perform, even as others scheme to make his house their own. Only under threat can the young man come to terms with both his strange inheritance and himself.
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:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
One tap mobile:
+13462487799,,2829783950#,,,,0#,,788597# US (Houston)
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbigMUsjuS
Everyone is warmly invited to join us for our newest book club, 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!)
For our third meeting, we’ll be discussing Josh Denslow’s short story collection, Not Everyone Is Special. Josh will be joining us at some point during the discussion, so we can chat with him about this wonderful collection and his writing career.
“Josh Denslow’s stories are intricate, fun, and beautiful, though always about heartbreak and loss. They’re like perfect little castles made of jewels and lego bricks that rise out of a howling abyss.” —Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
“When we meet the characters in Josh Denslow’s stories, they’re almost always already in trouble, and then they go looking for even more–but they do so with such heart and humor that you’ll inevitably fall in love with them, even (or especially) when they’re behaving their well-meaning worst. Not Everyone is Special is a smart and funny debut, often satirical and always generous, perfect for fans of George Saunders or Sam Lipsyte.” —Matt Bell, author of Scrapper
Josh Denslow is the author of the collection Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books). Recent stories have appeared in Catapult, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Hobart, and Pithead Chapel. In addition to exploring dungeons in the Legend of Zelda with his three boys, he plays the drums in the band Borrisokane.
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 here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
Five brown authors of Hispanic, Filipino, and South Asian origins discuss what it is like being brown in America, how that has shaped their writing, and informed their latest books. We’ll talk about growing up brown and the experience of finding a place (physical or state of mind) to be brown in America through our work, relationships, family, community, etc.
This discussion will take place via Zoom and will be moderated by Martha Anne Toll. The panelists are: Donna Miscolta (Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories); Grace Talusan (The Body Papers); Sejal Shah (This Is One Way to Dance); Sopan Deb (Missed Translations); and Jenny Bhatt (Each of Us Killers: Stories).
Martha Anne Toll (top left) is the 2020 Winner of the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Her debut novel, Three Muses, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing, Fall 2022. Her fiction has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, eMerge, Slush Pile Magazine, Yale’s Letters Journal, Inkapture Magazine, Referential Magazine, and Poetica E Magazine. Martha’s essays and reviews appear regularly on NPR and in The Millions; as well as in the Washington Post, Washington Post’s The Lily, The Rumpus, Bloom, Scoundrel Time, Music & Literature, Words Without Borders [forthcoming], After the Art, Narrative Magazine, [PANK] Magazine, Cargo Literary, Tin House blog, The Nervous Breakdown, Heck Magazine, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Her personal essay, “Dayenu,” was selected for an anthology featuring a range of well-known writers such as Lidia Yuknavich, Kwame Alexander, Dani Shapiro, and Ada Limón.
Donna Miscolta’s (top middle) third book of fiction Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories, about lessons a young Mexican American girl learns in a world that favors neither her race nor gender, was published by Jaded Ibis Press in September 2020. Her story collection Hola and Goodbye, winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and published by Carolina Wren Press (2016), won an Independent Publishers award for Best Regional Fiction and an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction. She’s also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced from Signal 8 Press (2011), which poet Rick Barot called “intricate, tender, and elegantly written – a necessary novel for our times.” Recent essays appear in pif, Los Angeles Review, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 and a short story is forthcoming in Latinx Subjectivities: A multi-genre anthology.
Grace Talusan’s memoir, The Body Papers, is a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a winner in nonfiction for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Her short story, The Book of Life and Death, was chosen for the 2020 Boston Book Festival’s One City One Story program and was translated into several languages, including Tagalog. Currently, Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University.
Sejal Shah (bottom left) is the author of the debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press, 2020). Her stories and essays have appeared in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, the Kenyon Review Online, Literary Hub, Longreads, Poets & Writers, and The Rumpus. The recipient of a 2018 NYFA fellowship in fiction, Sejal recently completed a story collection and is at work on a memoir about mental health. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University and lives in Rochester, New York.
Sopan Deb (bottom middle) is a writer for the New York Times. Before joining the Times, he covered Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign for CBS News. He is also a New York-city based comedian. He is the author of the memoir Missed Translations: Meeting The Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me.
Jenny Bhatt (bottom right) is a writer, literary translator, and book critic. She’s also the host of the Desi Books podcast. Her debut story collection, Each of Us Killers, launched last month in the US with 7.13 Books. Her literary translation, Ratno Dholi: Dhumketu’s Best Short Stories, from Gujarati to English, is out this month with HarperCollins India. Her non-fiction writing has appeared or will be coming soon in NPR, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, Longreads, Literary Hub, Poets & Writers, and several more.
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Join us for a reading from Rachel Genn, whose second novel, What You Could Have Won, will be released by And Other Stories in early November.
This event will take place via Zoom; see details below. The novel can be purchased via our online store, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.
“A captivating portrait of regret, addiction, and the will to survive.” —Publishers Weekly
Fame is the only thing worth having. Love is temporary brain damage. Or so thinks Henry Sinclair, a failing psychiatrist, whose career-breaking discovery has been pinched by a supervisor smelling of nipple grease and hot-dog brine. An emotional miser and manipulator par excellence, desperate for the recognition he’s certain his genius deserves, Henry claws his way into the limelight by transforming his girlfriend—a singer-in-ascendance, beloved for her cathartically raw performances—into a drug experiment. As he systematically works to reinforce feelings of worthlessness while at the same time feeding off Astrid’s fame, and as Astrid collapses deeper into dependence, what emerges is a two-sided toxic relationship: the bullying instincts of a man shrunk by an industry where bullying is currency, and the peculiar strength of a star more comfortable offloading her talent than owning her brilliance.
Pinging between their apartment in New York (where they watch endless episodes of The Sopranos), a nudist campsite in Greece (where the tantalizingly handsome Gigi thwacks octopuses into the sand), and a celebrity rehab facility in Paris (founded by the cassock-wearing and sex-scandal plagued ‘artist’ Hypno Ray), What You Could Have Won is a relationship born of regrettable events, and a novel about female resilience in the face of social control.
Rachel Genn is a neuroscientist, artist and writer who has written two novels: The Cure (2011) and What You Could Have Won (2020). She was a Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence (2016), creating The National Facility for the Regulation of Regret, which spanned installation art, VR and film (2016-17). She has written for Granta, 3:AM Magazine, and Hotel, and is working on Hurtling, a hybrid collection of essays about the neuroscience, art and abjection of artistic reverie. She’s also working on a binaural experience exploring paranoia, and a collection of non-fiction about fighting and addiction to regret. Genn works at the Manchester Writing School and the School of Digital Arts, both at Manchester Metropolitan University, and lives in Sheffield.
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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.
Due to COVID-19, this meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “suspense book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.
This month’s title is Who Is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht.
An exhilarating page turner and perceptive coming-of-age story, Who Is Vera Kelly? introduces an original, wry and whip-smart female spy for the twenty-first century.
“Gripping, subtle, magnificently written . . . This is a cool, strolling boulevardier of a book, worldly, wry, unrushed but never slow, which casts its gaze upon the middle of the last century and forces us to consider how it might be failing us still.” —The New York Times Book Review
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We’re delighted to announce the launch of our newest book club, A Season Of, in which we’ll spend several splendid months reading and discussing books by a single author. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. Our first pick is the acclaimed Argentinian writer César Aira, and for our first meeting we’ll be talking about The Hare, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor.
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, please email becky@malvernbooks.com with “season of aira” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.
Clarke is a nineteenth-century English naturalist who roams the pampas in search of an elusive animal: the Legibrerian hare, whose defining quality seems to be its ability to fly. The local tribesmen, pointing skyward, tell him about recent sightings of the hare, but then they ask Clarke to help them search for their missing chief, as well. On further investigation Clarke finds more than meets the eye: in the Mapuche and Voroga languages every word has at least two meanings.
Witty, very ironic, and with all the usual Airian digressive magic, The Hare offers subtle reflections on love, Victorian-era colonialism, and the many ambiguities of language.
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
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We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, 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 here, or call us regarding curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store. (This is a hardcover title and we are offering a 10% discount on our copies.)
On Saturday, November 28th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Envelope Poems by Emily Dickinson.
Although a very prolific poet―and arguably America’s greatest―Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. Instead, she created at home small handmade books. When, in her later years, she stopped producing these, she was still writing a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters. It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson’s later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy―addressed to no one and everyone at once.
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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. ***
This month’s selection is A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590173008.
L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s will, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends day and night on demolition and construction. At last he has a mission: he will dig up the lost history of his house; he will restore it to its past grandeur. He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.
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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Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our brand-new 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!
** 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. ***
Our first book is Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781632062239.
A Peruvian journalist’s vibrant musings on pregnancy and childbirth. In this whip-smart follow-up to Sexographies (2018), the author details her nine months of pregnancy as anything but pastel. Wiener interweaves facts on embryonic development and other scientific elements with visceral experience and accounts of her rabbit-hole internet searches to reveal the anxiety of her first full-term pregnancy…. Such dark, fertile forays signal Wiener’s original take on the simultaneously common and unique experience of pregnancy…. The author’s ruminations are consistently provocative, digging into areas many are not willing to go…. Wiener’s reflections on her relationship with her mother, which included microaggressions and tense exchanges, are also illuminating…. Refreshingly literary and offbeat—a mother-to-be book for firebrands. —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
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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!)
For our fourth meeting, we’ll be discussing Stealing Home: A Father, a Son, and the Road to the Perfect Game by will be joining us at some point during the discussion, so we can chat with him about this wonderful book and his writing career.
In an epic road trip with his Little League son, a divorced dad’s eight-ballpark journey tries to rescue his fatherhood—and learn how his dad’s suicide might not doom him to repeat a father’s mistakes.
The rarest outcome in sports is baseball’s perfect game. One team does everything right, forcing the other to accomplish nothing. In 150 years of baseball, there have only been 23. Perfect is nearly impossible. As a divorced dad, Ron was trying to redeem his fatherhood with a road trip with his son. Their odyssey of crossing eight states in a rented convertible was supposed to salvage Ron’s life as an unsure father. Custody fatherhood demoted him to the second team—he was certain of that. One sign of salvation came unbidden in an unscheduled tenth game. Thousands of miles and dozens of innings delivered a discovery: a drive toward perfect fatherhood has a destination that cannot be found on any map. It’s the tale of an eleven-day, nine-game trip —and how a father’s plans for perfection delivered things deeper than scores, miles, and smiles. Something magical and rare appeared at the end, in his heart as well as on a diamond.
“Part baseball, part fatherhood, and all boyhood, Stealing Home plays out the mystery of love and family. Fueled by his determination to become a better dad, Seybold’s journey becomes a quest to reconcile the past and his future. The magic lies in the storytelling that travels the road to something perfect.” —Donna Johnson, author of Holy Ghost Girl: A Memoir
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 here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or make an appointment to visit.
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Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months reading and discussing books by a single author. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. Our first pick is the acclaimed Argentinian writer César Aira. This month’s book is Ghosts.
Ghosts is about a construction worker’s family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter’s life hangs in the balance. Ghosts is the most unsettling and stunning of Aira’s short novels published so far by New Directions.
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “season of aira” 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.
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
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.
Due to COVID-19, 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 here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit. We are offering a 10% discount on our in-store copies.
This month’s title is That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye.
Herman’s wife and child are nowhere to be found, and the weather in the village, perfectly agreeable just days earlier, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tourist season is over. It’s time for the vacationing Parisians to abandon their rural getaways and return to normal life. But where has Herman’s family gone? A literary horror story about power and assimilation, That Time of Year marks NDiaye once again as a contemporary master of the psychological novel. Working in the spirit of Leonora Carrington and Kōbō Abe, NDiaye’s novel is a nightmarish vision of otherness, privilege, and social amnesia, told with potent clarity and a heady dose of the weird.
* * *
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Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, 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 here, or call us regarding curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store.
On Saturday, December 26th at 1pm Lucille Clifton’s “Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000.”
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Lucille Clifton, one of America’s most important and distinguished poets, employs brilliantly honed language, stunning images, and sharp rhythms to address the whole of human experience. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to confront our most salient issues.
“Although her work is often spare and simple, it is always beautifully and painstakingly crafted into poems that tell the truth, poems that insist on residing within the reader, poems by a poet who seeks and achieves the ability to be a vehicle for those who may not otherwise speak.” —Web Del Sol Review of 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. ***
This month’s selection is During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590177150.
Joan Chase’s subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of “joy and ruin” deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. The Queen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife who presides over a household of daughters and granddaughters. The novel tells their stories through the eyes of the youngest members of the family, four cousins who spend summers on the farm, for them both a life-giving Eden and the source of terrible discoveries about desire and loss. The girls bicker and scrap, they whisper secrets at bedtime, and above all, they observe the kinds of women their mothers are and wonder what kind of women they will become. But always present is the family’s great trauma, the decline and eventual death from cancer of Gram’s daughter Grace. A powerful story about family ties and tensions, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a book about place, charting the transformation of the old hardscrabble Midwest into the commercial wilderness of modern America.
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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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!
** 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. ***
This month’s pick is The Crying Book by Heather Christle. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781948226448.
Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen-tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.
Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.
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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!)
For our next meeting, we’ll be discussing Waking Up in Medellin by Kathryn Lane.
Page-turner author Kathryn Lane’s protagonist, Nikki Garcia, is sent to Medellin, Colombia, on assignment. Nikki embarks on an action-adventure as she investigates high stakes, mega-money corruption, grapples with her own ghosts, and yet finds romance in a foreign country. Then she’s kidnapped and she’ll have one shot at surviving…
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 the store; call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or make an appointment to visit.
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Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months reading and discussing books by a single author. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. Our first pick is the acclaimed Argentinian writer César Aira. This month’s book is The Seamstress and the Wind.
The Seamstress and the Wind is a deliciously laugh-out-loud-funny novel. A seamstress who is sewing a wedding dress for the pregnant local art teacher fears that her son, while playing in a big semitruck, has been accidentally kidnapped and driven off to Patagonia. Completely unhinged, she calls a local taxi to follow the semi in hot pursuit. When her husband finds out what’s happened, he takes off after wife and child. They race not only to the end of the world, but to adventures in desire – where the wild Southern wind falls in love with the seamstress, and a monster child takes up with the truck driver. Interspersed are Aira’s musings about memory and childhood, and his hometown of Coronel Pringles, with a compelling view of the hard lot of this working-class town, situated not far from Buenos Aires.
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 aira” 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.
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
* * *
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 here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit.
This month’s title is The So Blue Marble by Dorothy B. Hughes.
The society pages announce it before she even arrives: Griselda Satterlee, daughter of the princess of Rome, has left her career as an actress behind and is traveling to Manhattan to reinvent herself as a fashion designer. They also announce the return of the dashing Montefierrow twins to New York after a twelve-year sojourn in Europe. But there is more to this story than what’s reported, which becomes clear when the three meet one evening during a walk, and their polite conversation quickly takes a menacing turn. The twins are seeking a rare and powerful gem and they believe it’s stashed in the unused apartment where Griselda is staying. Baffled by the request, she pushes them away, but they won’t take no for an answer…
Drenched in the glamour and luxury of the New York elite, The So Blue Marble is a perfectly Art Deco suspense novel in which nothing is quite as it seems. While different in style from her later books, Dorothy B. Hughes’s debut highlights her greatest strengths as an author, rendered with both the poetic language and the psychology of fear for which she is known today.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 861 9362 0594
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We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, 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 here, or call us regarding curbside pick up.
On Saturday, January 23rd at 1pm we’ll be discussing Maggie Nelson’s Something Bright, Then Holes.
Before Maggie Nelson’s name became synonymous with such genre-defying, binary-slaying writing as The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty, this collection of poetry introduced readers to a singular voice in the making: exhilarating, fiercely vulnerable, intellectually curious, and one of a kind.
These days/the world seems to split up/into those who need to dredge/and those who shrug their shoulders/and say, It’s just something/that happened.
While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelson’s incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in Something Bright, Then Holes. Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital room of a friend, Nelson charts each emotional landscape she encounters with unparalleled precision and empathy. Since its publication in 2007, the collection has proven itself to be both a record of a singular vision in the making as well as a timeless meditation on love, loss, and―perhaps most frightening of all―freedom.
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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. ***
This month’s selection is Conversations with Beethoven by Sanford Friedman. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590177624.
Deaf as he was, Beethoven had to be addressed in writing, and he was always accompanied by a notebook in which people could scribble questions and comments. Conversations with Beethoven, in a tour de force of fictional invention, tells the story of the last year of Beethoven’s life almost entirely through such notebook entries: Friends, family, students, doctors, and others attend to the volatile Maestro, whose sometimes unpredictable and often very loud replies we infer. A fully fleshed and often very funny portrait of Beethoven emerges. He struggles with his music and with his health; he argues with and insults just about everyone. Most of all, he worries about his wayward—and beloved—nephew Karl. A large cast of Dickensian characters surrounds the great composer at the center of this wonderfully engaging novel, which deepens in the end to make a memorable music of its own.
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: 831 7213 0685
Passcode: 172151
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!
*** 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. ***
This month’s pick is The Body Papers by Grace Talusan. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781632061836.
Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of Talusan’s debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.
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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!)
For our next meeting, we’ll be discussing Dreams of Shreds and Tatters by Amanda Downum.
When Liz Drake’s best friend vanishes, nothing can stop her nightmares. Driven by the certainty he needs her help, she crosses a continent to search for him. She finds Blake comatose in a Vancouver hospital, victim of a mysterious accident that claimed his lover’s life. Blake’s new circle of artists and mystics draws her in, but all of them are lying or keeping dangerous secrets. Soon nightmare creatures stalk the waking city, and Liz can’t fight a dream from the daylight world: to rescue Blake she must brave the darkest depths of the dreamlands…. Dreams of Shreds and Tatters is a literary debut of Lovecraftian magnificence.
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 the store; call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or make an appointment to visit.
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Join Zoom meeting:
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Meeting ID: 833 2623 3668
Passcode: 106715
Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months reading and discussing books by a single author. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. Our first pick is the acclaimed Argentinian writer César Aira. This month’s book is Shantytown.
Maxi—a middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires’s shantytown—attracts the attention of a corrupt, trigger-happy policeman who will use anyone (including two innocent teenage girls) to break a drug ring that he believes is operating within the slum. A strange new drug, a secret code within a carousel of pirated lights, the kindness of strangers, murder…
No matter how serious the subject matter, and despite Aira’s “fascination with urban violence and the sinister underside of Latin American politics” (The Millions), Shantytown, like all of Aira’s mesmerizing work, is filled with wonder and mad invention.
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 aira” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up.
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 865 2758 4674
Passcode: 089337
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 here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.
This month’s title is The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan by Stuart Palmer.
Hildegarde Withers is just your average school teacher—with above-average skills in the art of deduction. The New Yorker often finds herself investigating crimes led only by her own meddlesome curiosity, though her friends on the NYPD don’t mind when she solves their cases for them. After plans for a grand tour of Europe are interrupted by Germany’s invasion of Poland, Miss Withers heads to sunny Los Angeles instead, where her vacation finds her working as a technical advisor on the set of a film adaptation of the Lizzie Borden story. The producer has plans for an epic retelling of the historical killer’s patricidal spree—plans which are derailed when a screenwriter turns up dead…
At once a pleasantly complex locked room mystery and a hilarious look at the foibles of Hollywood, The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan finds Palmer, a screenwriter himself, at his most perceptive. Reprinted for the first time in over thirty years, this riotously funny novel shows why Hildegarde Withers was among the most beloved detectives of the Golden Age American mystery novel.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 848 2638 3331
Passcode: 450008
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, 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 here, or call us regarding curbside pick up.
On Saturday, February 27th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Cameron Awkward-Rich’s Dispatch.
In his second collection, Cameron Awkward-Rich reckons with American violence, while endeavoring to live and love in its shadow. Set against a media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, these poems grapple with news of racial and gendered violence in the United States today an in its past.
“The poems in Awkward-Rich’s second collection speak with a poised urgency out of profound, enduring fear imposed by impossibly huge forces… and steady themselves, when steadiness seems possible, on the fact of an undiminishable self beyond language.” —American Poets
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Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87048910091?pwd=NllYdmF5Q1RZVFpxT0piakFNT0QxUT09
Meeting ID: 870 4891 0091
Passcode: 866664
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. ***
This month’s selection is The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781681374642.
Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”
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/85870611828?pwd=ZG5LSWpaSFVqSWFBa0dLRjZFTTNXQT09
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!
*** 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. ***
This month’s pick is A World Between by Emily Hashimoto. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781936932955.
In 2004, college students Eleanor Suzuki and Leena Shah meet in an elevator. Both girls are on the brink of adulthood, each full of possibility and big ideas, and they fall into a whirlwind romance. Years later, Eleanor and Leena collide on the streets of San Francisco. Although grown and changed and each separately partnered, the two find themselves, once again, irresistibly pulled back together.c Emily Hashimoto’s debut novel perfectly captures the wonder and confusion of growing up and growing closer. Narrated in sparkling prose, A World Between follows two strikingly different but interconnected women as they navigate family, female friendship, and their own fraught history.
“A sweeping debut novel about the ever changing nature of identity and love.” —Kirkus Reviews
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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 reading and discussing books by a single author. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. Our first pick is the acclaimed Argentinian writer César Aira. This month’s book is An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas’ trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the “physiognomic totality” of von Humboldt’s scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.
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 aira” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up.
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82661491461?pwd=T3BYbWt1bVZNelkvcDV3SUcxUlkrUT09
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 here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.
This month’s title is The Butchers’ Blessing by Ruth Gilligan
Set in the gothic wilds of Ireland, The Butchers’ Blessing is a haunting and unforgettable thriller brimming with secrecy, tradition, and superstition.
Every year, Úna prepares for her father to leave her. He will wave goodbye early one morning, then disappear with seven other men to traverse the Irish countryside. Together, these men form the Butchers, a group that roams from farm to farm, enacting ancient methods of cattle slaughter.
The Butchers’ Blessing moves between the events of 1996 and the present, offering a simmering glimpse into the modern tensions that surround these eight fabled men. Thrilling, dark, and richly atmospheric, The Butchers’ Blessing is an engrossing incantation—mesmerizing in both language and story—conjuring a family and a country on the edge of irrevocable change.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86204020046?pwd=VEZFSFEyRFA3Z2JLWmRackdsRnJ6UT09
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 here, or call us regarding curbside pick up.
On Saturday, March 27th at 1pm we’ll be discussing Anodyne by Khadijah Queen.
The poems that make up Anodyne consider the small moments that enrapture us alongside the daily threats of cataclysm. Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure—all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen’s poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live.
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Join Zoom meeting:
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Meeting ID: 867 8845 4475
Passcode: 816046
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. ***
This month’s selection is Living by Henry Green. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781681370682.
Living is a book about life in a factory town and the operations of a factory, from the workers on the floor to the boss in his office. The town is Birmingham and the factory is an iron foundry, like the one that Henry Green worked in for some time in the 1920s after dropping out of Oxford, and the stories—courtships, layoffs, getting dinner on the table, going to the pub, death—are all the ordinary stuff of life. The style, however, is pure Henry Green, at once starkly constrained and wildly streaked with the expedients and eccentricities of everyday speech—cliché and innuendo, clashing metaphors, slips of tongue—which is to say it is like nothing else. Epic and antic, Living is a book of exact observation and deep tenderness, the work, in Rosamond Lehmann’s words, of an “amorous and austere voluptuary” whose work continues to transform the novel.
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/89873088017?pwd=MVRDQ3J5QmpXVVV2SE5XR2ZJcjZXUT09
Meeting ID: 898 7308 8017
Passcode: 983380
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!
*** 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. ***
This month’s pick is Negotiations by Destiny O Birdsong. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 or send us a message for curbside pick up) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781951142131.
What makes a self? In her remarkable debut collection of poems, Destiny O. Birdsong writes fearlessly towards this question. Laced with ratchetry, yet hungering for its own respectability, Negotiations is about what it means to live in this America, about Cardi B and top-tier journal publications, about autoimmune disease and the speaker’s intense hunger for her own body—a surprise of self-love in the aftermath of both assault and diagnosis. It’s a series of love letters to black women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, silencing and tokenism, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand. It is a book about tenderness and an indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow black women’s lives, their power. But it is also an examination of complicity—both a narrative and a black box warning for a particular kind of self-healing that requires recognizing culpability when and where it exists.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 883 3153 3462
Passcode: 643155
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!)
For our next meeting, we’ll be discussing Little by Edward Carey, and Edward will join us for part of the discussion!
The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud.
“An amazing achievement … A compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself.” —Gregory Maguire, New York Times-bestselling author of Wicked
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.
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Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85954315647?pwd=ZGRza3dReEVnS0VNRXZLV0EvcWhxZz09
Meeting ID: 859 5431 5647
Passcode: 768842
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 Lucy Ellmann’s award-winning Ducks, Newburyport, a 426,100-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages! For our April meeting, you’re tasked with reading the first 200 pages.
Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America’s ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son’s toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing?
With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America’s barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy―and a revolution in the novel.“This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry.” —Parul Sehgal, New York Times
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “ducks 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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84306853554?pwd=NGFITVhGeU9UcmlXbWZ6SFl0enFwQT09
Meeting ID: 843 0685 3554
Passcode: 628430
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 here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or for an appointment to visit.
This month’s title is The Pronghorn Conspiracy by Boyd Taylor.
Donnie Ray Cuinn finds himself embroiled in a foreign plot against the President of the United States and uncovers a terrorist plan to steal a powerful secret from a nearby nuclear weapons plant. For reasons unknown to Donnie, the terrorists will deal only with him, so he is brought in to work alongside the FBI, Secret Service, and Vice President in an attempt to thwart the intricate scheme. Already at a breaking point in his life, Donnie must do what he can to negotiate the safety of the President, save the communities within range of the nuclear facility, and rescue all those he cares about.
In this action thriller, Boyd Taylor delivers a gripping story filled with political discord and ambition, suspense, and unexpected twists. The Pronghorn Conspiracy is Donnie Ray Cuinn’s last chance to right the wrongs before him and see if he can make it back from the point of no return.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 820 0211 5832
Passcode: 141357
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, April 24th, at 1pm we’ll be discussing Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong.
Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big”—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.
Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times writes: “The poems in Mr. Vuong’s new collection … possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words … There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.”
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Join Zoom meeting:
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Meeting ID: 841 4339 7219
Passcode: 300443
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. ***
This month’s selection is The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781590170250.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a startling tale of murder and madness set in a time of troubles like our own. Robert Wringhim is a religious fanatic: one of God’s chosen who believes himself free to disregard the strictures of morality–a view in which he is much encouraged by the elusive, peculiarly striking foreigner who becomes his dearest friend. Describing the seductive mutual dependence of these soulmates and the way–efficient at first, then increasingly intoxicated–they go about settling scores with their (and of course God’s) enemies, James Hogg presents a powerful picture of evil in the world and in the heart and mind. This work of black humor, acute psychological insight, and, in the end, deeply compassionate humanity is one of the masterpieces of literature in English.
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/85996349492?pwd=aG9KVmFtanVjZmluVldVRVFsVHA4Zz09
Meeting ID: 859 9634 9492
Passcode: 979608
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!
*** 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. ***
This month’s pick is Pain Studies by Lisa Olstein. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781942658689.
In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition.
“Lisa Olstein’s remarkable Pain Studies is a book built of brain and nerve and blood and heart, about what it means to live with pain. Irreverent and astute, synthesizing the personal and the historical, popular culture and poetry and visual art, Pain Studies will change how you think about living with a body in our beautiful and doomed world.” —Elizabeth McCracken
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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 874 8943 1110
Passcode: 958060
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!)
For our May meeting, we’ll be discussing Greg Levin’s The Exit Man. Greg Levin will join us for part of the discussion.
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.
Eli Edelmann never intended on making a living through mercy killing. After reluctantly taking over his family’s party supply store following his father’s death, Eli is approached by a terminally ill family friend who’s had enough. The friend, a retired policeman, has an intricate plan. Eli is initially shocked and repulsed by the proposal, but soon begins to soften his stance and, after much deliberation, eventually agrees to lend a hand. It was supposed to be a one-time thing. How could Eli have known euthanasia was his true calling? And how long can he keep his daring underground “exit” operation going before the police or his volatile new girlfriend get wise?
Greg Levin writes subversive thrillers and crime fiction. His novels include The Exit Man, Sick to Death, and In Wolves’ Clothing. Levin’s work has been optioned by HBO and Showtime, and has earned him a number of awards and accolades. He’s won two Independent Publisher Book Awards, and has twice been named a Finalist for a National Indie Excellence Book Award. In a starred review of In Wolves’ Clothing, Publishers Weekly wrote, “This author deserves a wide audience.” Levin’s agent and mother agree. Levin lived in Austin up until recently, but had to move because the authorities were after him for refusing to say “y’all.” He currently resides in Taos, NM, with his wife, dog and cat.
* * *
Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82594113541?pwd=NE15TkY4RVZWMlZUT3BWOERKQ2hZZz09
Meeting ID: 825 9411 3541
Passcode: 551420
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 Lucy Ellmann’s award-winning Ducks, Newburyport, a 426,100-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages! For our May meeting, you’re tasked with reading pages 200 to 400.
Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America’s ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son’s toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing?
With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America’s barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy―and a revolution in the novel.“This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry.” —Parul Sehgal, New York Times
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “ducks book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81959734594?pwd=Y1pXMUJqZVYwTjFMWENmd1UwSDFWZz09
Meeting ID: 819 5973 4594
Passcode: 567297
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 Passing by Nella Larsen.
Restless Classics presents the ninetieth anniversary edition of an undersung gem of the Harlem Renaissance: Nella Larsen’s Passing, a captivating and prescient exploration of identity, sexuality, self-invention, class, and race set amidst the boisterousness of the Jazz Age. When childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry cross paths at a whites-only restaurant, it’s been decades since they last met. Married to a bigoted white man who has no idea that she is African American, Clare has fully embraced her ability to “pass” as a white woman. Irene, also light-skinned and living in Harlem, is shocked by Clare’s rejection of her heritage, though she too passes when it suits her needs. This encounter sparks an intense relationship between the two women who, as acclaimed critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney writes in his insightful introduction, reflect Larsen’s own experience of being “between black and white, and culturally at home nowhere.” In a culture intent on setting boundaries, Clare and Irene refuse to adhere to expectations of gender, race, or class, culminating in a tragic clash of identities, as their relationship swings between emotional hostility and intense attraction.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86412121987?pwd=N1MxR2Z3OGFGeTJTNC9BbEN2OHcxUT09
Meeting ID: 864 1212 1987
Passcode: 249167
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, May 22nd, at 1pm we’ll be discussing Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith.
In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice—inquisitive, lyrical, and wry—turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.
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Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82259350653?pwd=cVRYMGZQd0NXODVXQXJJK1A1a2FsUT09
Meeting ID: 822 5935 0653
Passcode: 040073
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 Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon.
Family Lexicon is considered a masterpiece of European literature that blends family memoir and fiction. An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking–when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.
Family Lexicon is about a family and language–and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it],” Ginzburg tells us at the start. “The places, events, and people are all real.”
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/89021188866?pwd=b2VpZWhqR3VVaGVTc1ZmaWFMK2VUdz09
Meeting ID: 890 2118 8866
Passcode: 421389
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!
*** This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “Smashing book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store. ***
This month’s pick is Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi.
Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in childhood to cause a human mother misery. She has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family but lives in fear of the consequences of her decision. Kambirinachi and her two daughters become estranged from one another because of a trauma that Kehinde experiences in childhood, which leads her to move away and cut off all contact. She ultimately finds her path as an artist and seeks to raise a family of her own, despite her fear that she won’t be a good mother. Meanwhile, Taiye is plagued by guilt for what her sister suffered and also runs away, attempting to fill the void of that lost relationship with casual flings with women. But now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past.
For readers of African diasporic authors such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Butter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88366146119?pwd=Z1k1WnpHMERoZDAwN2kxbGJBSTBwZz09
Meeting ID: 883 6614 6119
Passcode: 607079
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 Lucy Ellmann’s award-winning Ducks, Newburyport, a 426,100-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages! For our June meeting, you’re tasked with reading pages 400 to 700.
Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America’s ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son’s toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing?
With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America’s barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy―and a revolution in the novel.“This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry.” —Parul Sehgal, New York Times
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “ducks book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84251840156?pwd=RDZ0WGtVNERXTEhya3VmaFRkOERpQT09
Meeting ID: 842 5184 0156
Passcode: 809990
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 Trafik by Rikki Ducornet.
From the singularly inventive mind of Rikki Ducornet, Trafik is a buoyant voyage through outer space and inner longing, transposing human experiences of passion, loss, and identity into a post-Earth universe. Quiver, a mostly-human astronaut, takes refuge from the monotony of harvesting minerals on remote asteroids by running through a virtual reality called the Lights, chasing visions of an elusive red-haired beauty. Her high-strung robot partner, Mic, pilots their Wobble and entertains himself exploring his records of the obliterated planet Earth, searching for Al Pacino trivia, unfamiliar recipes, and high fashion trends. But when an accident destroys their cargo, Quiver and Mic go rogue, setting off on a madcap journey through outer space towards an idyllic destination: the planet Trafik.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82916465279?pwd=WExRMXd0bE5SaFJjOHhITjBvZFlPdz09
Meeting ID: 829 1646 5279
Passcode: 323691
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, June 26th, at 1pm we’ll be discussing Little Glass Planet by Dobby Gibson.
Little Glass Planet exults in the strangeness of the known and unknowable world. In poems set as far afield as Mumbai and Marfa, Texas, Dobby Gibson maps disparate landscapes, both terrestrial and subliminal, to reveal the drama of the quotidian. Aphoristic, allusive, and collaged, these poems mine our various human languages to help us understand what we might mean when we speak to each other―as lovers, as family, as strangers. Little Glass Planet uses lyric broadcasts to foreshorten the perceived distances between us, opening borders and pointing toward a sense of collectivity. “This is my love letter to the world,” Gibson writes, “someone call us a sitter. / We’re going to be here a while.” Elegiac, funny, and candid, Little Glass Planet is a kind of manual for paying attention to a world that is increasingly engineered to distract us from our own humanity. It’s a book that points toward hope, offering the possibilities of a “we” that only the open frequency of poetry can create, possibilities that are indistinguishable from love.
* * *
Join Zoom meeting:
Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.
*** This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store.
This month’s selection is Marshlands by André Gide.
André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and of autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing, Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader’s hand. Marshlands is both a poised satire of literary pretension and a superb literary invention, and Damion Searls’s new translation of this early masterwork by one of the key figures of twentieth-century literature brings out all the sparkle of the original.
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:
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!
*** This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “Smashing book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store. ***
This month’s pick is Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse.
“Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.” Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.” She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead. These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.” Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse–elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet–teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.
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Everyone is warmly invited to join us for Lone Star Lit at Malvern Books. This friendly, informal book club will focus on books by Texas writers (and with a bit of luck the authors themselves might sometimes be able to join us too!)
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “lone star lit” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit the store.
For our July meeting, we’ll be discussing The Sisters Mederos by Patrice Sarath, who will join us for part of the discussion.
Two sisters fight with manners, magic, and mayhem to reclaim their family’s name, in this captivating historical fantasy adventure. House Mederos was once the wealthiest merchant family in Port Saint Frey. Now the family is disgraced, impoverished, and humbled by the powerful Merchants Guild. Daughters Yvienne and Tesara Mederos are determined to uncover who was behind their family’s downfall and get revenge. But Tesara has a secret—could it have been her wild magic that caused the storm that destroyed the family’s merchant fleet? The sisters’ schemes quickly get out of hand—gambling is one thing, but robbing people is another…. Together the sisters must trust each another to keep their secrets and save their family.
PATRICE SARATH is an author and editor living in Austin, Texas. Her novels include the fantasy series Books of the Gordath, and the romance The Unexpected Miss Bennet. Her numerous short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies.
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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 Lucy Ellmann’s award-winning Ducks, Newburyport, a 426,100-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages! For our July meeting, you’re tasked with reading from page 701 to the end of the book!
Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America’s ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son’s toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing?
With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America’s barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy―and a revolution in the novel.“This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry.” —Parul Sehgal, New York Times
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “ducks 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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