Malvern Books

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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Join us in celebrating the launch of Hoa Nguyen’s new poetry collection, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure. Hoa will be joined by Roberto Tejada, author of the poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006). This event will take place via Zoom.

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.

Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. By turns lyrical and unsettling, Hoa Nguyen’s poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.

Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry including Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and Violet Energy Ingots. With the poet Dale Smith, she published the small press magazine and book imprint Skanky Possum from Austin Texas, her home of fourteen years. Her latest from Wave Books, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, is a poetic narrative of historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” and includes a verse biography of the poet’s mother who once was a member of an all-women motorcycle circus troupe. Born in Vinh Long and raised and educated in the US, Hoa has lived in Toronto since 2011.

Roberto Tejada is the author of poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), selected poems in Spanish translation, Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), and a Latinx poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019). He founded and co-edited the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, a multilingual annual of poetry and translation (1991-2014). He is also the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2020) He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.

Please RSVP to becky@malvernbooks.com for Zoom info. You can also watch this reading live on our YouTube channel.

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

*** This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. ***

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:
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Meeting ID: 859 9634 9492
Passcode: 979608

This month, we’re pleased to present featured readings by winners from the 2020 Pen2Paper creative writing contest, Edie Bakker and Lucia Gagliese!

Edie Bakker (3rd Place in Poetry for “Grappling with Dissociative Identity Disorder”) was raised in Papua New Guinea, the daughter of anthropologist/missionaries. Edie led two expeditions to save a rainforest and wrote about them for National Geographic magazine. She has a Bachelor’s in Anthropology and has the equivalent of an FMA. Edie has written seven books, short stories, and poems.

Lucia Gagliese (2nd Place in Fiction for “The Caregiver”) is a clinical psychologist and professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her work focuses on pain, aging, and end of life care. She studied creative writing at the Humber School for Writers and her fiction has appeared in The Healing Muse and is forthcoming in The Leaf. “The Caregiver” is a health narrative that integrates her clinical and research interests with her personal experience of losing a friend to ALS.

After Edie and Lucia, it will be your time to shine! Sign up to PERFORM by noon Apr. 30: https://forms.gle/ryoqXSaLbuEi7jQR6. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

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

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

Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary!

*** 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

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kathleen Peirce’s new collection, Lion’s Paw (Miami University Press). This event will take place via Zoom, and Kathleen will be joined by poet Joanna Klink, author of The Nightfields.

Lion’s Paw and The Nightfields 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.

In this gratifyingly dense and philosophically ambitious sixth collection, Peirce considers the relationship between perception and the lyric imagination. “When from the wet point on a spiral,/ dreams approach, most nights increase themselves/ like wings, like a tumbler of perfume in flames,” Peirce muses in language as lyrical as it is rife with dramatic tension. One of her many poetic gifts is her ability to offer a sense of urgency while depicting inner experience: “The viewer disregards the view,/ looks neither at the window nor through, but forward/ across the table where the right hand draws a face in profile, whose?, and the left/ is a weight on the sheet.” The syntax and juxtaposition of Peirce’s lines reveal the complexities of self-reflection, and the inexact, self-doubting nature of thought. Elsewhere, she remarks, “Some things are prettier than the day, and some/ will force lightheadedness onto thinking about them.” This is an impressive addition to Peirce’s distinguished body of work. —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Kathleen Peirce’s Lion’s Paw (Miami University Press 2021) is her sixth collection of poems. She’s also the author of Vault (New Michigan Press 2017), The Ardors (Ausable/Copper Canyon 2004), The Oval Hour (University of Iowa Press 1999), Divided Touch, Divided Color (Windhover Press 1995), and Mercy (University of Pittsburgh Press 1991). She’s the recipient of a Whiting Award, and fellowships from The National Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Texas State University.

Joanna Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields, which was published by Penguin last July. She has received awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Trust of Amy Lowell, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. The New York Times calls The Nightfields “a remarkable volume,” and it was named one of five “Best Poetry Collections of 2020” by the Washington Post.

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Join Zoom event:

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Meeting ID: 882 2416 4047
Passcode: 643449

You can also watch this event live on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCclZdTQQCBXU1-PN9dBPR6g.

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.

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Join Zoom meeting:
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Meeting ID: 825 9411 3541
Passcode: 551420

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. This event will take place via Zoom.

This month’s featured reader is Jacob Grovey.

Jacob writes:

I write to speak for those who feel voiceless. The characters created within the pages of my books represent all of us; they are unique, they are flawed, they are scared and ambitious, they are resilient in spite of being hurt, they are sufficient, even when they feel inadequate. We are more alike than we sometimes want to believe, and through my writing, I hope we are able to be unified in love, instead of being divided by hatred. The name on the books may be mine, but these are our​ stories. I am a husband, entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and a writer. I believe we may have great talents individually, but together, we can do great things!

Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 893 2720 5489
Passcode: 257428

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.

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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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:

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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:
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Meeting ID: 822 5935 0653
Passcode: 040073

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Julie Poole’s Bright Specimen (Deep Vellum). With readings from Julie and guest Taisia Kitaiskaia.

With the loving eye of an amateur botanist, poet Julie Poole has distilled nature to its finest, tender points. Through poems spread delicately across the page, interspersed with images of the pressed flowers themselves, Poole’s poetry gives voice to a meditative expression of flora. Each poem creates an individual cataloged world through which to explore the body, sexuality, strength, and a devout refusal to admit the separation between humans and nature. Inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the largest herbaria in the Southwestern United States, Bright Specimen weaves together a written index through the harmony of botanical wonder.

Julie Poole was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book of poems, Bright Specimen, was inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin. She has received scholarships and fellowship support from the James A. Michener Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, 100 West, and Yaddo. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. She lives in Austin with her growing collection of found butterflies.

Taisia Kitaiskaia is a Russian-American poet and writer. She is the author of The Nightgown and Other Poems; Literary Witches, a collaboration with artist Katy Horan; a divination deck, The Literary Witches Oracle; and two books of advice from the Slavic folklore witch Baba Yaga, Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles and its follow-up, Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times: From Ask Baba Yaga. Her work has been published in A Public Space, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, Fence, Guernica, and elsewhere and her work has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Austin, TX.

Zoom information:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81595707311?pwd=R1BoWU9wT0JEQXF4RUhIMmYwS1EzQT09

Meeting ID: 815 9570 7311
Passcode: 232562

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 the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic!

This month, we’re pleased to present featured readings by winners from the 2020 Pen 2 Paper creative writing contest: Jasmine Ledesma (1st Place in Non-fiction for “How Sad, How Lovely”) and Pat Hulsebosch (2nd Place in Non-fiction for “Watch Closely”)!

Then it will be your time to shine! Sign up to PERFORM by noon, June 5th at https://docs.google.com/…/1FAIpQLSdK9xgG9ftI22…/viewform. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

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

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

Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary!

*** 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 the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! This month, we’re pleased to present featured performances by Pen 2 Paper alum, writer, and performer Maria Palacios!

After Maria, it will be your time to shine! As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

Sign up by noon, July 2nd, at: https://forms.gle/CL22HgqutgtoNrDu8.

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

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

Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary!

*** 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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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Jason Marc Harris’ novella Master of Rods and Strings. With readings from Jason and guest Lowell Mick White.

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

Lowell Mick White is the author of six books: novels Normal School, Professed, Burnt House, and That Demon Life, and story collections Long Time Ago Good and The Messes We Make of Our Lives. A winner of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, White teaches at Texas A&M University.

Zoom information:

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.

* * *

Join Zoom meeting:

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

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

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 Albina and the Dog-Men by Alejandro Jodorowsky, translated by Alfred MacAdam.

Albina and the Dog-Men is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s darkly funny, shocking, and surreal hybrid of mystical folktale, road novel, horror story, and social parable, ultimately uniting in a universal story of love against the odds and what makes us human.

When two women—an amnesiac goddess and her protector, a leather-tough woman called Crabby—arrive in a Chilean desert town, Albina’s otherworldly allure and unfettered sensuality turn men into wild beasts. Chased by a clubfooted corrupt cop, evil corporate overlords, giant-hare-riding narcos, and Himalayan cultists, Albina and Crabby must find a magical cactus that will cure Albina and the men’s monstrous affliction before the town consumes itself in an orgy of lust and violence…

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81746108492?pwd=YjYxQ293TkdlOURvZklINld1NVNsZz09

Meeting ID: 817 4610 8492
Passcode: 543581

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

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, July 24th, at 1pm we’ll be discussing The Renunciations: Poems by Donika Kelly.

The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of “the oracle”—an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility. In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma—a home whose construction starts “with a razing.”

Join Zoom meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82317029244?pwd=ajRzMStxeG50UGZtSHVvMWE1TXdJUT09

Meeting ID: 823 1702 9244
Passcode: 104900

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

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

Sign up to perform here by noon, July 31st.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Meeting ID: 814 3602 4137
Passcode: 260646

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83721805823?pwd=Y05tbklGUGMrVTdlVUJYMVAzSXFZQT09

Meeting ID: 837 2180 5823
Passcode: 016822

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom meeting:

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

Meeting ID: 837 5299 6075
Passcode: 268699

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting ID: 837 8338 4810
Passcode: 353443

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Meeting ID: 894 4715 4514
Passcode: 107358

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting ID: 822 3310 2045
Passcode: 932784

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87173961727?pwd=Y29PY0ZtSzh4RzN3b1M0U2IwcGVxUT09

Meeting ID: 871 7396 1727
Passcode: 664868

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Meeting ID: 878 9432 6788
Passcode: 037754

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Meeting ID: 843 3842 8673
Passcode: 397587

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting ID: 860 9279 3462
Passcode: 090503.

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

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

This month’s pick is Rome by Dorothea Lasky.

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

Join Zoom meeting:
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Meeting ID: 816 9920 9063
Passcode: 801848

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting ID: 818 1243 8629
Passcode: 730401

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82313847542?pwd=Y3ZLOFZUeDVVa21sWFA1RzMyUHpzUT09

Meeting ID: 823 1384 7542
Passcode: 196131

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting ID: 844 6092 3645
Passcode: 384198

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting ID: 856 3743 6064
Passcode: 495993

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Meeting ID: 893 6452 4564
Passcode: 402205

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
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Passcode: 342512

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

This month’s featured reader is Stephanie Macias.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Passcode: 713715

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

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

November’s selection is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This month’s featured reader is Kendra Christel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Join us via Zoom for a reading with Awst Press, featuring authors Donald Quist, Andrew Yoon, and Esteban Rodríguez.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This month’s pick is Poems by Uszula Kozioł.

Using words, expressions, images, and sounds from a variety of sources—popular magic, songs heard in her childhood, the music of Bach, everyday conversations and works of great philosophers—Uszula Kozioł established herself as one of the most important voices in Polish poetry. In an idiom similar to Paul Celan, Kozioł takes the reader into diverse and unique topics from the world of a snowflake to the life of Circe. She is a poet with the fine sensibility of our time who has embarked on the quest for the knowledge of reality, and comments on all aspects of that reality, including the precariousness of life, relationships, and humankind’s survival with intensity and intelligence. A bilingual collection every serious student of 20th-century poetry should have on their shelf.

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

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

November’s title is Apocalypse Baby by Virginie Despentes, translated by Sian Reynolds.

Apocalypse Baby is a smart, fast-paced mystery about a missing adolescent girl traveling through Paris and Barcelona. She is tailed by two mismatched private investigators: the Hyena, part ruthless interrogator, part oversexed rock star, and Lucie, her plain and passive—almost to the point of invisible—sidekick. As their desperate search unfolds, they interrogate a suspicious cast of characters, and the dark heart of contemporary youth culture is exposed.

“Despentes explores deeply flawed but interesting characters; the limits of traditional female roles; the ravages of the European class system; the challenge of Internet control; and the destructive self-indulgence of a youth culture that lacks its own deeply held beliefs and is, as such, easily manipulated by the darkest authority.” —Kirkus

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

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

December’s selection is Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson.

In Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, a team of workers has been given the job of digging the foundation of an immense edifice, a palatial home for the perfect future that, they are convinced, is at hand. But the harder the team works, the deeper they dig, the more things go wrong, and it becomes clear that what is being dug is not a foundation but an immense grave. The Foundation Pit is Platonov’s most overtly political book, written in direct response to the staggering brutalities of Stalin’s collectivization of Russian agriculture. It is also a literary masterpiece. Seeking to evoke unspeakable realities, Platonov deforms and transforms language in pages that echo both with the alienating doublespeak of power and the stark simplicity of prayer. This English translation is the first and only one to be based on the definitive edition published by Pushkin House in Moscow. It includes extensive notes and, in an appendix, several striking passages deleted by Platonov. Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson’s afterword discusses the historical context and style of Platonov’s most haunted and troubling work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This month’s featured reader is Maurice Chammah.

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

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

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

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

Zoom Information:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87347005276?pwd=UmxiYkFEcG0zWURZcHBGbGRWa3k2UT09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December’s title is Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes.

Sailor used to be Senator Willis Douglass’ protege. When he met the lawmaker, he was just a poor kid, living on the Chicago streets. Douglass took him in, put him through school, and groomed him to work as a confidential secretary. And as the senator’s dealings became increasingly corrupt, he knew he could count on Sailor to clean up his messes. Willis Douglass isn’t a senator anymore; he left Chicago, Sailor, and a murder rap behind and set out for the sunny streets of Santa Fe. Now, unwilling to take the fall for another man’s crime, Sailor has set out for New Mexico as well, with blackmail and revenge on his mind. But there’s another man on his trail as well—a cop who wants the ex-senator for more than a payoff. In the midst of a city gone mad, bursting with wild crowds for a yearly carnival, the three men will violently converge. The suspenseful tale that inspired one of the most beloved films noir of all time, Ride the Pink Horse is a tour-de-force that confirms Dorothy B. Hughes’ status as a master of the mid-century crime novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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Meeting ID: 854 4949 9003
Passcode: 121440

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

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

For our January meeting, we’ll be discussing Ghosts of Yokosuka by Britta Jensen, and the author will be joining us for part of the discussion!

From the award-winning author of the Eloia Born series, comes a new novella about identity, finding oneself in the midst of wandering spirits, and young love in a Japanese port city. Fourteen-year-old Annabelle’s only friends are ghosts. To make matters worse, her Japanese birth father left her family two years ago and her mother has recently remarried an American sailor. Her already difficult life on the backstreets of 1980s Yokosuka, Japan, has gotten a lot more complicated as she tries to navigate the complicated social strata between the Filipino, American, and Japanese cultures on the small naval base. When a motherless boy drifts into her world, her life changes in unexpected ways. The shifting weight of the adult responsibilities she has shouldered for far too long makes her question if life with only her ghosts caring for her is enough?

Britta Jensen’s debut YA novel Eloia Born won the 2019 Writer’s League of Texas YA Discovery Prize and was long-listed for the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. The sequel, Hirana’s War, was released in October 2020. Many of Britta’s stories explore themes of persevering through disability, parental separation, and the intersection of various cultures on new worlds. Her stories have been shortlisted for the 2017 Henshaw Press and Fiction Factory prizes and she was published in Stories for Homes, Volume 2. Britta’s plays have been performed in New York City, Japan, and South Korea. She earned a BA in Acting Performance from Fordham University and an MA in Teaching of English Literature from Columbia University. For the past seventeen years she has taught creative writing and edited books for both traditional and indie authors. She has received numerous awards, including the General Sharp Award from the US Army, for her innovative teaching of creative writing in New York City, South Korea, and Germany. Friends often refer to her as a polyglot—which is a product of living twenty-two years overseas in Japan, South Korea, and Germany, before settling in Austin, Texas. She enjoys mentoring writers and editing books with The Writing Consultancy and Yellowbird Editors. In her spare time she dances Argentine Tango, sings, and volunteers with the Relief Society, SCBWI, and the Writer’s League of Texas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January’s title is Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris.

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

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Meeting ID: 861 5603 3800
Passcode: 145498

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

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

January’s title is Percival Everett’s The Trees. (Please note, this book contains some strong racial language.)

Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.

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Meeting ID: 871 3590 0256
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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of two poetry collections from John Sibley Williams: The Drowning House, winner of The Elixir Press Poetry Award, and Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, winner of The Cider Press Review Book Award. With guests Chloe Martinez and Esteban Rodriguez.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoom Information:

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

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