Malvern Books

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

Our October selection is The Green Man by Kingsley Amis, a novel that manages to be both a truly frightening ghost story and a very black comedy.

A splendid chiller, in the uncomplicated, old-fashioned sense. As one might expect from the author of Lucky Jim, The Green Man is also an extremely funny book, filled with slapstick, parody and satire. Indeed, the success of this short novel depends very much on the balance that Amis maintains between fear and laughter.
—Robert Kiely, New York Times

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

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on October 7th.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon.

October’s featured reader ANNAR VEROLD is a Honduran-American poet and screenwriter. A former Creative Writing student at ACC and a graduate of St. Edward’s University, her work has appeared in the Spoon River Poetry Review and is forthcoming in the second Aural Literature anthology. She works for Host Publications, and is co-curator of the I Scream Social reading series.

An open mic follows, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kurt Heinzelman’s new book of poetry, Whatever You May Say. With readings from Kurt and Danielle Sellers.

Kurt Heinzelman’s new book of poetry, Whatever You May Say, resembles what would have been called a “miscellany” in the 18^th-century, the most popular way of constructing a poetry collection back then. Such miscellanies would include poems in many different genres and modes exhibiting a wide variety of formal characteristics. The poems might be spoken by multiple voices, and the collections would certainly include translations, another way of introducing voices not the author’s own. Heinzelman co-founded in the 1970s a highly regarded journal called The Poetry Miscellany. True to this origin, his new book includes an array of poetic forms (sonnet, photoessay, haiku, Provençal canso, Spanish “mote,” a valedictory address, and so on), narrative settings both foreign and domestic, a short one-person play (which was originally performed as a dance), and multiple translations, including one that is a poem for children. Heinzelman’s writing is “always a pleasure,” according to Lawrence Raab; this is “not a book to miss,” says Wendy Barker.

A native of Wisconsin, Kurt Heinzelman lived for a number of years in western Massachusetts. His work as a poet, scholar, and translator is widely published. He is also an editor, having co-founded two literary journals, The Poetry Miscellany and Bat City Review, and served as editor-in-chief of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. He lives in Austin, Texas where he is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Texas and is a faculty member in the Michener Center for Writers.

Danielle Sellers is from Key West, FL. She has an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of Mississippi where she held the John Grisham Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, Smartish Pace, The Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Her first book, Bone Key Elegies, was published by Main Street Rag. Her second poetry collection, The Minor Territories, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2018. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.

Join us for a meeting of the Boomertime Book Club!

The Boomertime Book Club aims to read all types of books, fiction and nonfiction. We select the book to be read at a meeting and then discuss it at the next meeting. We meet monthly. We limit attendance at each meeting to  no more than twelve in order to encourage participation by all. Attendance is first come, first served. We encourage guests and encourage new membership within the Meetup Boomertime social group. For more information, please email Greg Smith at greg02390239@gmail.com.

Boomertime is a Meetup group for babyboomers (ages 50+). Its purpose is to provide opportunities for Austin adults to have fun and meet new people. Boomertime is a group where individuals can make friends and can plan events around their special interests for all to participate in. Boomers dance, hike, read, talk, laugh, and engage in many more activities.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

You’re already familiar with our NYRB Classics Bookclub, in which we read and discuss classic works of fiction… now we’d like to invite you to join The Other Book Club, a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from the “Other” section of our store.

Our recently expanded “Other” collection includes ever so eclectic essays, plays, creative non-fiction, memoirs and more. Featuring books like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travels through the Greek islands and the political tracts of Simone Weil—and let’s not forget Oskar Panizza’s blasphemous essay on the history of the pig!—our non-fiction section is as unusual as the rest of our store.

October’s book will be Mary MacLane’s I Await the Devil’s Coming, a shocking, brave and intellectually challenging diary of a 19-year-old girl living in Butte, Montana in 1902. Written in potent, raw prose that propelled the author to celebrity upon publication, the book has become almost completely forgotten.

A small masterpiece, full of camp and swagger. —Parul Sehgal, choosing I Await the Devil’s Coming as one of “5 Forgotten Classics Worth Revisiting” on NPR

The book crackles with its author’s outsized personality and outrageous proclamations, yet its shock tactics are rooted in genuine feeling. —Biographile

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on Saturday, October 21st, at 1pm!

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for a fun and friendly afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

This month we have a special Halloween Edition—ghost stories, costumes, and candy to share are encouraged!

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kathryn Lane’s Backyard Volcano and Other Mysteries of the Heart, an anthology of short stories from Alamo Bay Press. Kathryn will be joined by Lowell Mick White.

These stories help define the world of the Texas-Mexico Frontier—an explosive world where lives break, loves shatter, and healing happens. Kathryn Lane, a native of Mexico, explores this world, leading readers on a journey through time and geography with the promise of magic and transformation. Lane’s short fiction contains a fusion between fantasy and reality, often layered with symbolism and punctuated by hints of surrealism.

Award-winning author Kathryn Lane writes fiction inspired by Latin American cultures she experienced during her career as an international finance executive and in her life growing up in Mexico. Her debut novel, Waking Up in Medellin, was recognized with a Killer Nashville Silver Falchion for Best Fiction Book of the Year 2017 and a second Silver Falchion for Best Fiction Adult Suspense 2017. Her novel also received a Pinnacle Achievement Award in Fiction. She is a 2017 finalist for the RONE Award in the Mystery category. In 2017, the novel was also released in Spanish, under the title Despertando en Medellín. Association of Writers and Writing Programs featured Kathryn on the Arriba Baseball! panel in Seattle (2014). She has been recognized in her community with a Montie Award for Excellence in the Arts, and as a member of the Rotary Club, she has twice been honored with the Paul Harris Award. She lives in Texas with her husband Bob Hurt, where she serves on the Montgomery County Literary Arts Council.

Lowell Mick White is the author of three books: Professed and That Demon Life, novels, and Long Time Ago Good, a story collection. Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award and a Dobie-Paisano Fellow, White teaches at Texas A&M University.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kathleen Peirce’s Vault. With readings from Kathleen and Lisa Olstein, and hosted by Cecily Parks.

Find here: poetry’s virtues/pleasures. Gorgeous witness. Silence muscled with qualities. Net of attentiveness rippling outward from the meeting of the seer and the seen. Kin to The Tempest: the wondrous woven of the mundane. The strength of purpose and hearkening needed to walk in beauty’s strangeness. Its sensuousness; its intimacy (especially with necessity) that supples its language. Patience of soul spun into physical brilliance. Time present and antique, interior and exterior, “feather of hair in one hand, / scissors in another, not the heart / beating but what might return over the heart.” These are the most beautiful poems I know. —Liz Waldner

Vault is Kathleen Peirce’s fifth book of poetry. Previous work has been awarded The AWP Award for Poetry, The Iowa Prize, and The William Carlos Williams Award. Her writing has been supported by the National Foundation for the Arts, The Giles Whiting Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. A member of the faculty with Texas State’s MFA program in Creative Writing since 1993, she lives in Wimberley.

Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Late Empire (October 2017). Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Hayden Carruth Award, a Lannan Literary Residency, an Essay Press chapbook prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Centrum, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she currently serves as a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

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.

Our November selection is Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding…

I—whose usual bed time is ten o’clock—stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding—dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist.
— Carson McCullers

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

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on November 4th.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Lyman Grant’s new poetry collection, Old Men on Tuesday Mornings (Alamo Bay Press). The book is dedicated to four other Austin men—John Lee, Bill Jeffers, David Jewell, and John McElhenney—and they will also be reading at the launch.

Looking back across the vista of time, these poems keep a watchful eye on the memory-wolves that stalk us with their hard truths and expired dreams. The deep consideration of the many selves we’ve been along the way drew me in and held me-each piece taking a facet of the lived life and holding it close before letting it go. The writing is lush with compassion, honesty, joy, acceptance, and above all, lyricism. —Charlotte Gullick, author of By Way of Water

Old Men on Tuesday Mornings features lyrical poetry on the process of aging and the transition from one life-stage to another, on the passing of time and its relentless impact on masculinity and the male image, and on on the place of the solitary individual in 21st Century America.

Lyman Grant worked at Austin Community College for 34 years as a professor of English, Creative Writing, and Humanities. He is the author and editor of several books, including five volumes of poetry. The most recent is Old Men on Tuesday Mornings, poems inspired in a men’s writing group with John Lee, David Jewell, Bill Jeffers, and John McElhenney.

John Lee is author of the best-selling book The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man and twenty-three others. He is a counselor, coach, and public speaker.

David Jewell is a Neo-DaDa would-be astronaut bohemian and sometimes writer type.

Bill Jeffers is a tall person, sculptor, very low key political opinion-holder, and occasional poet of sorts.

John McElhenney is a social media strategist, dad, and writer, and blogs at uber.la.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon.

Featured reader W. Joe Hoppe is a poet, mechanic, and professor of English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Galvanized (Dalton Publishing) and Diamond Plate (Obsolete Press). His poems have appeared in Borderlands, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy and Utter, and the Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. He was named Austin’s Best Mopar Poet for 2016 by the Austin Chronicle.

An open mic follows, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

Join us in celebrating the launch of two new books: Boyd Taylor’s Necessities, the fourth novel in the Donnie Ray Cuinn Series, and William Darling’s Anahuac, the second book in the Jim Ward series.

Boyd Taylor (above) is the author of four novels in the Donnie Ray Cuinn Series—Hero, The Antelope Play, The Monkey House, and his most recent work, Necessities (trailer here), which will be available to readers in November. Boyd, a graduate of the University of Texas and the UT Law School, has written fiction all his life. He was enrolled in Dr. Gerald Langford’s creative writing course at the University of Texas, who advised him to go to law school. He honed his fiction-writing skills as an attorney and later as an executive for a large chemical company, writing countless long-range business plans that required imagining the future in the form of scenarios, most of which never came to pass. Company assignments took Boyd and his family to locations as diverse as the Texas Panhandle, Appalachia, New England and the Texas Gulf Coast. He was able to travel the world on business. He learned from direct observation that however different people and places may seem, people everywhere face similar paradoxes of love and loss, life and death, and self-sacrifice and betrayal. Boyd lives with his wife in Austin, Texas.  He has committed to her to write a novel a year and to keep to his study and his trusty Underwood typewriter, out of harm’s way. Unbeknownst to her, he is now using a MaxBookPro. Boyd welcomes inquiries and comments from his readers, who may contact him at Antelopecity@icloud.com or on his Facebook page.

William D. Darling (above) is a lifelong storyteller and very nearly a native Texan, arriving in his beloved state as an infant in 1942. His first novel, Morgan’s Point, introduced readers to both the mid-‘60s rough-and-tumble world of the Houston courts where Darling came of age, and the Galveston Bay region that has long fascinated him. His latest novel Anahuac, serves as a sequel to Morgan’s Point as well as its own fascinating tale. Darling, who has lived within the legislative bustle of Washington, D.C. and in the beauty of a Central Texas ranch, currently resides in Austin, where he and his wife have built a longstanding law practice.

Join us in celebrating the launch of the graphic novel I, Parrot, by acclaimed author Deb Olin Unferth and with stunning illustrations by artist Elizabeth Haidle. Deb and Elizabeth will be interviewed by award-winning writer Mary Helen Specht.

When Daphne loses custody of her son, she is willing to do whatever it takes to get him back―even if it means enlisting the help of the wayward love of her life, a trio of housepainters, a flock of passenger pigeons, a landlady from hell, a super-sized bag of mite-killing powder, and more parrots than she knows what to do with. 

I, Parrot dips into the surreal with poignancy and humor. In this riveting, funny, and tragic graphic novel, Daphne must risk everything. Her quest is ultimately a tale about civilization’s decline, the heartbreak of extinction, and the redemption found in individual revolution.

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of four books, including Wait Till You See Me Dance and Revolution, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, and Tin House. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Elizabeth Haidle is a freelance artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the creative director and regular contributor at Illustoria magazine, while writing and illustrating a nonfiction graphic novel series and raising her teenage son.

Mary Helen Specht’s first novel, Migratory Animals, was an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and the Austin American-Statesmen, an IndieNext Pick, and an Apple iBook selection. Migratory Animals also won the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Best Book of Fiction. A past Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University. Texas Monthly has named her one of “Ten Writers to Watch.”

Illustrations above by Elizabeth Haidle

Join us in celebrating the launch of Meg Freitag’s debut poetry collection, Edith. Meg will be joined by Taisia Kitaiskaia and Blake Lee Pate.

In a time when so much of our poetry seems ironic and detached, its language overwrought or restrained, its associations timid or excessively mentalized, it’s a true pleasure to encounter this fresh new voice, vibrant and full of the wild sap of life. And like Edith, chained to the sky. — Dorianne Laux

“No one is free” says Bob Dylan, “even the birds are chained to the sky.” Edith is a book about a bird, a beloved bird that dies an untimely death and is mourned accordingly. Edith is ethereal, part muse, part icon, part confidant, her name echoes through the poems in what Pound would call the “manner of the musical phrase”, the way the name Tarumba sounds through the work of the Mexican poet Jaime Sabines, or the name Naomi in Bill Knott’s first collection, repeats itself like a talisman.

Meg Freitag was born in Maine. She is the author of Edith (2017), selected by Dorianne Laux as winner of the 2016 BOAAT Book Prize. She has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of Texas, Austin, where she was a Michener Fellow. Her work can be found in Tin House, Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals.

Taisia Kitaiskaia was born in Russia and raised in America. She is the author of Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers, illustrated by Katy Horan. Her poetry has been published widely. Her most recent work is Ask Baba Yaga, a collection of “otherworldly advice for everyday troubles.” Taisia lives in Austin, Texas.

Blake Lee Pate received her MFA in poetry from the New Writer’s Project and currently teaches English at Austin Community College. She has poems in the Dead Animal Handbook Anthology, Spoon River Poetry Review, Glittermob magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Rob Jackson’s The Witness, a collection of meditations in the form of poems, stories, and straight talk on spirituality.

The Witness is a modern take on a classic genre of spiritual works pioneered by the likes of Kahlil Gibran. It dances between playful verses, elegant stories, and contemplative poems that are not only pleasing sensually, but a call for deeper contemplation of life. The Witness is sometimes human, sometimes plant, sometimes inanimate, but always present and always deepening in awareness of self—inviting the reader to join in the experience through meditative practices.

Rob Jackson is a free-spirited, big-hearted fellow whose life journey has taken him from professional MMA fighter and coach, to project and business manager in energy and biotech, to advisor for nonprofit boards, to facilitator of workshops and community organizer. Currently, Rob is working on his next book, as well as writing blogs and articles. Rob’s work is to embody the invitation to come and play and express oneself as authentically as they are able. In this way, he teaches others to unleash their best potential. He does this through his writings, group events, and one-on-one intuitive counseling.

You’re already familiar with our NYRB Classics Bookclub, in which we read and discuss classic works of fiction… now we’d like to invite you to join The Other Book Club, a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from the “Other” section of our store.

Our recently expanded “Other” collection includes ever so eclectic essays, plays, creative non-fiction, memoirs and more. Featuring books like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travels through the Greek islands and the political tracts of Simone Weil—and let’s not forget Oskar Panizza’s blasphemous essay on the history of the pig!—our non-fiction section is as unusual as the rest of our store.

November’s book will be Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel memoir Mani: Travels In The Southern Peloponnese.
The Mani, at the tip of Greece’s southernmost promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people’s daily lives. Patrick Leigh Fermor bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century.

Almost every page has its own literary tour de force, often with intimidating displays of learning and research mixed with fantasy, imagination and acute descriptions of the scene itself.
— Robin Hanbury-Tenison

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on Saturday, November 18th!

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for a fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us for a meeting of the Boomertime Book Club!

The Boomertime Book Club aims to read all types of books, fiction and nonfiction. We select the book to be read at a meeting and then discuss it at the next meeting. We meet monthly. We limit attendance at each meeting to  no more than twelve in order to encourage participation by all. Attendance is first come, first served. We encourage guests and encourage new membership within the Meetup Boomertime social group. For more information, please email Greg Smith at greg02390239@gmail.com.

Boomertime is a Meetup group for babyboomers (ages 50+). Its purpose is to provide opportunities for Austin adults to have fun and meet new people. Boomertime is a group where individuals can make friends and can plan events around their special interests for all to participate in. Boomers dance, hike, read, talk, laugh, and engage in many more activities.

Join us for a celebration hosted by Pterodáctilo, the bilingual journal and blog run by graduate students in UT Austin’s department of Spanish and Portuguese. This bilingual event will feature poetry readings… and tamales!

Performers include Siri, Ashley Nelcy García, Montserrat Madariaga, and Michael Reyes.

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.

Our December selection is Simon Leys’ The Death of Napoleon, an alternative history that looks at “what could have been” had Napoleon escaped from exile on Saint Helena and returned to France to try to claim back his throne.

Utterly satisfying sentence by sentence and scene by scene, but it is also compulsively readable . . . Simon Leys throws light on our universal need to bring inner and outer reality together, to understand who we really are.— The Times Literary Supplement

A small masterpiece. So much spirit, so much insolence, and so much emotion joined in so few pages overwhelmingly earn the reader’s enthusiasm and praise. One closes the book regretfully, sincerely hoping that Simon Leys will not stop there. —Corinne Desportes, Le Magazine Litterairet

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

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on December 2nd.

For twenty years, the Austin reading for the Texas Poetry Calendar has been the culmination of the fall calendar readings for Dos Gatos Press. This year’s reading will feature poets sharing Texas-related work, including their poems from the 2018 Texas Poetry Calendar (edited by Wade Martin, Allyson Whipple, and David Meischen).

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon.

Featured reader John T. David, an Austin journalist and author, and Brent Douglass, an international businessman from Austin, collaborate with James R. Dennis, a former attorney turned Dominican friar who lives in San Antonio, under the name Miles Arceneaux; they have recently published Hidden Sea, the fifth in a series of thrillers set on the Gulf Coast.

An open mic follows, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

Join us in celebrating the release of the Fall 2017 edition of Austin Community College’s journal, The Rio Review, which showcases poetry, prose, and artworks by students. During the event, students featured in this issue will share their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with us.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Ryan Sharp’s new chabook, my imaginary old man: poems (Finishing Line Press). With readings from Ryan, Joe Brundidge, and Jennine “DOC” Wright.

The poems in my imaginary old man: poems construct a world alive with the ordinary and the mysterious. There is a sustained music to these poems, a music that sings out through an imagined throat, a music that both cracks a bell and is heard as the screech of tires. I like who this imagined man is, and how his idiosyncrasies could belong to any of us. These poems act like a mirror held up to the world asking us to notice what’s real all around and to search for what matters.

---

—Dorianne Laux, recipient of The Paterson Prize and author of The Book of Men

Ryan Sharp is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin where his research focuses on contemporary Black American persona poetry and the Archive. His poetry and reviews have appeared in several journals including Callaloo, Copper Nickel, and PANK. He lives with his wife and two children in Austin, TX, where he serves as the editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and as the Writers’ Studio Coordinator at Huston-Tillotson University.

Joe Brundidge has hosted a number of open mic events for almost 20 years, including Spoken & Heard at Kick Butt Coffee, an event he curates. He also served as the Director of the Austin International Poetry Festival for three years, from 2012-2015.

Jennine “DOC” Wright is a mother, writer, artivist and educator in Austin, Texas. She has competed in world, national, and local competitions. She holds four titles to include Killeen Poetry Slam that placed 2nd overall in the nation in 2012 and Neo Soul Poetry Slam placing 1st in group piece finals in 2013. Jennine was the 2015 season slam champ for Austin’s Neo Soul and was also the coach for Austin Poetry Slam’s 2016 national team. She teaches English at Huston-Tillotson University while mentoring for the Speak Piece Poetry Project, a youth performance poetry program. She is currently wiring a musical and is also an MFA poetry student at Spalding University.

Join us in celebrating the launch of David Taylor’s third collection of poetry, Palm Up, Palm Down (Wings Press). With readings from David, Jim LaVilla-Havelin, and Bryce Milligan.

Palm Up, Palm Down draws on connections and commitments to home and place—human and nonhuman. Such a topic is not new to poetry; however, this book moves in circles, out and away, then returns home, rediscovering the quiet beyond/within the concept of “home.” The collection moves readers to slow not only their reading but encourages them to slow down the pace of their lives, allowing time to inhabit, listen, and invite in the broad array of neighbors.

David Taylor’s lyrical meditation on walking rhythmically through this world and noticing gleaming details with each footstep offers a reprieve from the blows of city life and the daily injustices on our streets. This book is a refuge. The poems are feather-light with the packed-in wisdom of old river stones. They know the currents. They do not move. What moves is the spirit in the dynamic lines of Taylor’s work. Whether we are circling the lake with the poet, or dancing to Havana’s rhythms, this poetry provides real company, partnership. —Marilyn Kallet, author of The Love That Moves Me

David Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability at Stony Brook University. His writing crosses disciplinary boundaries and genres—creative nonfiction, poetry, scholarship and science/technical writing; however, at the core of his work always is the concern for sustainability and community. One of his current projects is “The People’s Art and Modernism: Woody Guthrie, Joseph Campbell and Miguelito Valdés in New York in the 1940s.” Woody Guthrie’s writing (e.g. Bound for Glory) and music, Joseph Campbell’s interest in an ecology of folk mythologies, and the rise of popular Latin, esp. Afrocuban, music, for example, by Miguelito Valdés (or “Mr. Babalu”), function as windows into a time and place that allowed diverse interactions and legacies in the arts that still resonate today. Natural history writing and creative nonfiction include Lawson’s Fork: Headwaters to the Confluence (Hub City Press, 2000), a personal narrative on the history and natural history of Lawson’s Fork, Spartanburg’s local river. He edited an anthology, Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing (UNT Press, 2006). Steve Wolverton and he co-edited and contributed to a collection of essays about an interdisciplinary project on Mesa Verde archaeological sites and their representations to the public, titled Sushi in Cortez: Essays from the Edge of Academia (University of Utah Press, 2015). Taylor is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Praying Up the Sun (Pecan Grove Press, 2008) and The Log from The Sea of Cortez: A Poem Series (Wings Press, 2014).

Jim LaVilla-Havelin (above) is a poet, educator, and arts administrator. He is the author of four previous books of poems—Rites of Passage (Charon Press 1968), What the Diamond Does Is Hold It All In (White Pine Press 1978), Simon’s Masterpiece (White Pine Press 1983), and most recently, Counting (Pecan Grove Press, 2010). LaVilla-Havelin’s poems have appeared in the Texas Observer and other journals; in the anthologies Is This Forever, Or What? and Between Heaven & Texas; and in the Texas Poetry Calendar (and in Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair, the Dos Gatos Press anthology from the Texas Poetry Calendar). He was the Director of the Young Artist Programs at the Southwest School of Art for seventeen years, retiring in May 2013 to teach, write and consult. LaVilla-Havelin’s essays and criticism have appeared in Ceramics Monthly, Ceramics: Art & Perception, and Surface Design Journal, and exhibition catalogues of Danville Chadbourne and Rex Hausmann. He is editing a collection of poetry and visual art about sport, entitled Levelling the Playing Field, and is working on a book-length poem about jazz, Playlist. LaVilla-Havelin is the Coordinator of National Poetry Month events in San Antonio, and the Poetry Editor for the San Antonio Express-News. He has taught, read, offered workshops, presentations, and teacher trainings throughout the Northeast, Ohio, and Texas. A twenty-two year Texan, LaVilla-Havelin lives with his wife, the artist Lucia LaVilla-Havelin, in Lytle, Texas.

Bryce Milligan (above) is an author working in numerous genres, from children’s books to novels for young adults, to adult poetry and criticism. Bloomsbury Review once called him a “literary wizard.” Critic Paul Christensen wrote of Milligan as “one of the principal writers of the region and a force at the center of the literary art movements of Texas.” Milligan was the book columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and the San Antonio Light throughout the 1980s and early ’90s. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN American Center, and the Texas Institute of Letters, his reviews and essays appeared in many journals and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, et al. The founding editor of Pax: A Journal for Peace through Culture (1983-1987) and (with Roberto Bonazzi) Vortex: A Critical Review (1986-1990), he directed the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s literature program and its San Antonio Inter-American Book Fair and Latina Letters conferences for several years. Milligan has been the publisher, editor and book designer of Wings Press since 1995. Wings Press has been profiled in numerous publications, including Poets & Writers Magazine and the Huffington Post. Milligan was the primary editor of Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (Riverhead, 1995)—which was the first all-Latina anthology to be published by a major American publishing house—and Floricanto Si: A Collection of Latina Poetry (Penguin, 1998). He has edited several smaller anthologies and critical collections, and designed numerous books for other presses. Milligan is the author of four historical novels and short story collections for young adults. With the Wind, Kevin Dolan (1987) received the Texas Library Association’s Lone Star Book Award. One of his children’s books, Brigid’s Cloak, was a 2002 “Best of the Year” pick by both the Bank Street College and Publishers Weekly. Some of his gallery theater pieces have been produced weekly at the Witte Museum in San Antonio for over 25 years. Milligan is also the author of six previous collections of poetry. His poetry and his song lyrics have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Southwest Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Clover, and Texas Observer, among others. Once upon a time, he was a working luthier and a singer/songwriter (twice a semi-finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s New Folks songwriting competition). He has taught English and creative writing at every level, including workshops from California to Prague. Milligan is a recipient of the Gemini Ink “Award for Literary Excellence” and the St. Mary’s University President’s Peace Commission’s “Art of Peace Award” for “creating work that enhances human understanding through the arts.”

Join us in celebrating the launch of Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922 by Marina Tsvetaeva. This event will feature readings and discussion from the translator, Jamey Gambrell.

Jamey Gambrell’s excellently translated edition with its well-researched and informative introduction graciously fulfils Tsvetaeva’s desire to see these pieces of diaristic prose bound in a single volume. —Rachel Polonsky, The Times Literary Supplement

Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters, find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life.

Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. She has translated works by Tsvetaeva and Tatyana Tolstaya, in addition to Vladimir Sorokin’s three-volume Ice trilogy and his Day of the Oprichnik and The Blizzard. This spring, the one-man show “Brodsky/Baryshnikov” premiered, featuring her translated surtitles of Joseph Brodsky’s poetry. Gambrell was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, which recognizes “a significant contribution to the art of literary translation.”

Join us for an afternoon with Coco Picard, Devin King, Anthony Madrid, Nadya Pittendrigh, and Julia Hendrickson. We’ll be celebrating the release earlier this year of Coco’s graphic novel The Chronicles of Fortune.

The Chronicles Of Fortune stands as a confirmation of the misfit’s path in life. Not only is it okay to be different, it’s okay to look like a failure in the eyes of others. Who cares? Just you, you’re the only one who needs to care. And are you happy? That seems to be what Picard is asking. —Comics Beats

Originally published as a series of mini-comics, The Chronicles of Fortune follows the lives of Fortuna, and her alter-ego, Edith-May, as they learn to cope with loss, recruiting a team of friends along the way. Discover a temperamental stove, a nosy mountain, a goofy crocodile, a loner moth, and a singing goldfish as they lead Fortuna on her greatest adventure. At once charming, sad, funny, poignant, and bizarre, The Chronicles of Fortune keeps one foot in mundane reality.

Coco Picard (above) is a writer, publisher, and curator. She is the Executive Director of The Green Lantern Press—a nonprofit publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005—and the Co-Director of Sector 2337, a hybrid artspace/bar/bookstore in Chicago. Her critical writing appears under the name Caroline Picard in publications like ArtForum (critics picks), art21, Flash Art International, Hyperallergic, and The Seen. A recent essay about the cats of James Joyce, Marcel Broodthaers, Derrida, the Walker Art Center, and Art Orienté object, The Strangers Among Us, was released in chapbook-form by Astrophil Press in 2017. Fiction and comics have appeared in Hyperallergic, The Coming Envelope (Book Thug), Necessary Fiction, Tupelo Quarterly, Everyday Genius and she has two contributions in vols 1 + 3 of The Graphic Canon (Seven Stories Press). TSK, a novel inspired by the ghost of Joseph Beuys, is forthcoming from Gold Wake Press in 2019.

Devin King is the co-director of Sector 2337 and the poetry editor for the Green Lantern Press. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Lana Turner, LIT, and Poetry. His second book, just out from Canarium (February 2017), is called Try Never.

Nadya Pittendrigh teaches writing at the University of Houston–Victoria.

Julia V. Hendrickson is a curator, writer, and editor, and the Associate Curator at The Contemporary Austin.

Join us for a poetry reading and birthday cake to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park, Albert Huffstickler. With M.C. W. Joe Hoppe, and featuring readings from David Jewell, Sylvia Manning, David Thornberry, and Larry Thoren. Plus, get a free copy of Huff’s book, Walking Wounded, with every purchase on December 17th!

Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was born in Laredo, Texas, but he lived in Austin in his later years, and became a local literary legend. You could usually find him in a café in Hyde Park, decked out in suspenders, smoking, drinking coffee, and working on a poem. (Rumor has it he wrote a poem a day, and his impressive publication record—four full-length collections, plus hundreds of poems published in chapbooks and journals—lends veracity to the story.) He was a two-time winner of the Austin Book Awards, and in 1989 the state legislature formally honored him for his contribution to Texas poetry. In May 2013 a new Hyde Park green space at the corner of 38th and Duval Streets was named Huffstickler Green in his honor. Huff was a friend and inspiration to many, and everyone who knew him talks of his kindness, his honesty, and his passionate support for local literature. Austin Community College English professor W. Joe Hoppe describes his friend and mentor as “a great encourager of poetry.”

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

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.

Our January selection is Tayeb Salih’s The Wedding of Zein.

Everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that Zein will be getting married, since Zein’s particular role in the life of the village has been the peculiar one of falling in love again and again with girls who promptly marry another man. It would be unheard of for him to get married himself.

In Tayeb Salih’s wonderfully agile telling, the story of how this miracle came to be is one that engages the tensions that exist in the village, or indeed in any community: tensions between the devout and the profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional. In the end, however, Zein’s ridiculous good luck augurs an ultimate reconciliation, opening a prospect of a world made whole.

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

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on January 6th.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for a fun and friendly afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us for a meeting of the Boomertime Book Club!

The Boomertime Book Club aims to read all types of books, fiction and nonfiction. We select the book to be read at a meeting and then discuss it at the next meeting. We meet monthly. We limit attendance at each meeting to  no more than twelve in order to encourage participation by all. Attendance is first come, first served. We encourage guests and encourage new membership within the Meetup Boomertime social group. For more information, please email Greg Smith at greg02390239@gmail.com.

Boomertime is a Meetup group for babyboomers (ages 50+). Its purpose is to provide opportunities for Austin adults to have fun and meet new people. Boomertime is a group where individuals can make friends and can plan events around their special interests for all to participate in. Boomers dance, hike, read, talk, laugh, and engage in many more activities.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

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

For our inaugural meeting, we’ll be discussing Joy of Missing Out by Ana Božičević.

Joy of Missing Out is starlite verse on death and independence for the dreamers, dropouts, rebels and the neuroatypical. A confession and sublimation of breakdowns personal and systemic, JOMO paints a playful and unflinching portrait of the ups and downs of city survival and queer romance. Simultaneously it deploys online slang and high lyrical registers, morphs the sad girl into Baba Yaga, drops truth bombs on art and politics, and puts the sin into sincerity. Even as it engineers the death of its speaker, JOMO is a paradoxically joyous litany of her endurance and a boost-plea to stay in a messed-up world and say it out loud. This anthem is best read at night or dawn when no one’s around for a Like or a kiss.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on Saturday, January 27th, at 1pm for the inaugural meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club.

WHAT: An Open Mic Night to celebrate “We Are ALL America!”

This event is open to the public! We invite the Austin community to tell their stories, read poems, make a brief statement or share their ideas on our theme of “We Are All America.” This is an opportunity to speak to our experiences and challenges, especially in response to the last year of events.

We only ask that our speakers and attendees be kind and respectful to one another. For many people, this was a particularly challenging year and we want to ensure that everyone feels welcome and supported. Our Open Mic Night is intended to bring people together in solidarity as an inclusive and welcoming community.

WHY: On January 27, 2018 the Austin Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations will host a Open Mic Night to support the National Day of Action one year after the date the first Executive Orders were issued banning refugees and individuals from several Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the United States.

This event is intended to increase awareness of the challenges faced by our neighbors, our community and our nation. The “We Are All America” movement works to uphold and strengthen our community’s commitment to welcome and protect all those seeking freedom, safety and refuge. Joining us in supporting this cause will strengthen the message that we belong to an inclusive and diverse community where all belong, no matter their differences.

Join us in celebrating the launch of the second issue of Kallisto Gaia Press’ literary journal, The Ocotillo Review, which features over 100 pages of literary genius by award-winning writers from around the world and superb new pieces by writers from underserved communities. Numerous poets and writers will read excerpts of their work from this edition, including Gloria Amescua, Catherine Castoro, Karen Collier, Marilyn Duncan, Gayle Guernsey, Stephen Hamilton, Lindsey Lane, and Allyson Whipple.

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.

Our February selection is Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, the hilarious tale of a young American woman hell-bent on living who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s.

One of the funniest books I’ve ever read; it should be subtitled Daisy Miller’s Revenge.
— Gore Vidal

American goes to some big city with dreams of conquest, hilarity ensues. Dundy’s 1958 novel (which had a huge fan in Groucho Marx) is pretty much the best and funniest example of that whole genre.
—Flavorwire

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

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on February 3rd.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Come and celebrate our 4th birthday with this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us in celebrating the release of John Vanderslice’s historical novel, The Last Days of Oscar Wilde. With readings from John Vanderslice and Lucas Schaefer.

Oscar Wilde is struggling through his final years in Paris. His reputation is ruined. His finances are in shambles. He drinks too much. He is reduced to begging meals from strangers; he even resorts to minor fraud to raise a few more pounds to live on. The most important romantic relationship of his life, his alliance with Lord Alfred Douglas, is now but a strained, overwrought friendship marked on both sides by resentments and guilt. And yet against this backdrop of poverty, social downfall, and disappearing fortitude, Oscar Wilde survives. While his sense of self has been rent, he maintains his humor, an active joie de vivre, an affection for superstitious religiosity, and a network of devoted friends. He even manages to fall in love again. But can his close circle of devoted friends convince him to pick up his pen one more time and write?

John Vanderslice teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Central Arkansas. His stories, poems, essays, and one-act plays have appeared in scores of literary journals, including Laurel Review, Seattle Review, South Carolina Review, and Crazyhorse. His linked booked of stories Island Fog (Lavender Ink Press) was named by Library Journal as one of the Top 15 Indie Fiction Titles of 2014. His historical novel The Last Days of Oscar Wilde has just been released by Burlesque Press. 

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month’s featured reader is Emilee Araujo, an aspiring screenwriter and Creative Writing major at ACC. She has served as an editor of the Rio Review, and has been published there.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Join us for an evening with acclaimed poet Carl Phillips. We’ll be celebrating the recent release of his new collection, Wild Is the Wind. This event is sponsored by the Michener Center for Writers.

In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named—love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past’s capacity both to teach and to mislead us—also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love’s fallout. How “to say no to despair”? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee? These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips’s remarkable work, stand as further proof that “if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we would have needed to invent him. His idiosyncratic style, his innovative method, and his unique voice are essential steps in the evolution of the craft.” —Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review

Carl Phillips is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018). His collection The Rest of Love (FSG, 2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other books include Rock Harbor (FSG, 2002); The Tether (FSG, 2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Pastoral (Graywolf Press, 2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Carl Phillips is a visiting poet at the Michener Center for a one week residency this semester.

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

This month’s selection is The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde.

The Black Unicorn is a collection of poems by a woman who, Adrienne Rich writes, “for the complexity of her vision, for her moral courage and the catalytic passion of her language, has already become, for many, an indispensable poet.”

Rich continues: “Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader’s eye.”

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

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

This month’s selection is Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl, a masterful analysis of what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world.

Christine toils in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine’s rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same…

In The Post-Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart … The story is poignant, painful, and must be one of fiction’s darkest indictments of how poverty destroys hope, enjoyment, beauty, brightness and laughter, and how money, no matter how falsely, provides ease and delight.
—The Spectator

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

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month’s featured reader is David Thornberry.

David Thornberry is a painter and poet, alternating between the two art forms. He continues to make, publish and show art, both literary and visual, in the Austin area. His 30th chapbook, Too Soon, is scheduled to be published in March.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

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

This month’s selection is Silk Poems by Jen Bervin.

Silk Poems takes silk as subject and form, exploring its cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities. In conjunction with Tufts University’s Silk Lab’s cutting-edge research on liquified silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem composed in a six-character chain that corresponds to the DNA structure of silk; modeled on the way a silkworm applies filament to its cocoon. This poem, written from the perspective of the silkworm, explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written inside the body.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us in celebrating the launch of new books from Charles Alexander and Saba Syed Razvi. With readings from Charles, Saba, and Kyle Schlesinger (left to right, below).

Charles Alexander writes poems, publishes books, makes books, teaches poetry and other literary works. He has published 6 full books of poems and 13 chapbooks. He has been engaged for some two decades on the work Pushing Water, whose first volume was published by Cuneiform Press. The second volume, titled AT the Edge OF the Sea: Pushing Water II, has just been released by Singing Horse Press in San Diego. Alexander directs Chax Press, and has been a director and principle in many poetry community-building endeavors, including POG, Inc., in Tucson, Arizona, and currently as the co-curator of the University of Houston-Victoria Center for the Arts and the director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is most closely identified with Tucson, Arizona, where he and Chax Press spent approximately 30 years and to where he will return in Summer 2018. A collection of his essays on poetry and books will be published in 2019. He co-creates a variety of works and projects with his partner, the visual artist Cynthia Miller.

Saba Syed Razvi is the author of In the Crocodile Gardens (Agape Editions), heliophobia (Finishing Line Press), Limerence & Lux (Chax Press), Of the Divining and the Dead (Finishing Line Press), and Beside the Muezzin’s Call & Beyond the Harem’s Veil (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Offending Adam, Diner, TheTHE Poetry Blog’s Infoxicated Corner, The Homestead Review, NonBinary Review, 10×3 plus, 13th Warrior Review, The Arbor Vitae Review, and Arsenic Lobster, and others, as well as in anthologies such as Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality, The Loudest Voice Anthology, The Liddell Book of Poetry, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, The Rhysling Anthology, Dreamspinning, and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace. Her poems have been nominated for the Elgin Award, the Bettering American Poetry Awards, The Best of the Net Award, the Rhysling Award, and have won a 2015 Independent Best American Poetry Award. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX, where in addition to working on scholarly research on interfaces between Science and contemporary Poetry, she is researching Sufi Poetry in translation, and writing new poems and fiction.

Kyle Schlesinger is a poet living in Austin. Some recent and forthcoming poetry books include: Sydney Omarr’s Wild Children, with the artist Flynn Maria Bergmann; Swish Void, with poet Grant Cross; and Life, with poet Ted Greenwald.

We’re thrilled to be hosting a series of readings as part of the 26th annual Austin International Poetry Festival.

See the Austin International Poetry Festival website to sign up and for the full schedule of readings.

AIPF takes place April 5-8 and includes unique Austin venues, diverse themed poetry readings, open mics, workshops, music and poetry, anthology reading, dusk to dawn, and a poetry symposium. AIPF is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

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

This month’s selection is The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999). Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of The Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy’s novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.

A masterfully paced and intellectually daring plot. Like the best science fiction, of which this is an exemplar, Bioy’s themes have become ever more relevant to a society beholden to image. It is this keenness of thought and expression that buttresses Borges’s claim of the novella’s perfection. —The Times

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

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

Join us in celebrating the launch of the novel Collision Theory by Adrian Todd Zuniga. With readings from Adrian and Jason Neulander.

Collision Theory is Adrian Todd Zuniga’s memorably heartfelt and headlong debut novel. Its suddenness, its unexpectedness, its humor, and its humanity make for an unforgettable, surprising, and emotional read.

Adrian Todd Zuniga (below left) is a creator and host of Literary Death Match, and is the founding editor of Opium Magazine, which is a reading series that occurs regularly in New York City, San Francisco, and London, and has launched in 54 cities worldwide including Beijing, Edinburgh, Chicago, and Paris. Zuniga is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer for his short fiction and an award-winning journalist.

Jason Neulander (below right) is an award-winning theatre artist, filmmaker, and producer based in Austin, Texas. He founded and was the artistic director of Austin’s premiere producer of new plays Salvage Vanguard Theater from 1994 to 2008. His transmedia sci-fi multiverse THE INTERGALACTIC NEMESIS, which he wrote, directed, and produced, premiered in 2010 and has taken the form of graphic novels, a YouTube series, podcasts, audio dramas, novels, and a live theatrical tour. It was adapted for television by PBS. His feature film debut Fugitive Dreams shoots in 2018. “A seemingly inexhaustible ability to surprise. And thrill. And horrify. And amuse. And intrigue.” —The Austin Chronicle

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Our April open mic will be an official City Read for the Austin International Poetry Festival! AIPF takes place April 5-8 and includes unique Austin venues, diverse themed poetry readings, open mics, workshops, music and poetry, anthology reading, dusk to dawn, and a poetry symposium. AIPF is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us for a reading with Anna Maria Hong and Roger Reeves. We’ll be celebrating the release of Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, which won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, and also her novella, H & G, which won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s inaugural Clarissa Dalloway Prize and has been just published by Sidebrow Books.

Anna Maria Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2017 First Book Poetry Competition and will be published in April 2018. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s inaugural Clarissa Dalloway Prize and will be published by Sidebrow Books in May 2018. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in 2019. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry and fiction in over 50 journals and anthologies including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Ecotone, POOL, Fence, Harvard Review, The Volta, Verse Daily, Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry and The Best American Poetry. She will join the Literature faculty at Bennington College in July 2018.

Roger Reeves is the author of the poetry collection King Me (Copper Canyon) and recipient of honors and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House. Kim Addonizio selected “Kletic of Walt Whitman” for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He earned his MFA from the Michener Center in 2010 and his PhD in English from UT’s Dept of English, and he previously taught at University of Illinois/Chicago.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month’s featured reader is Ken Fontenot, a poet and novelist who lives in Austin. He is author of four books of poetry, including In a Kingdom of Birds, which was names best book of poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters, and All My Animals and Stars, which won the Austin Book Award; and a novel, For Mr. Raindrinker.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Harold Whit Williams’ new poetry collection, Red Clay Journal. Harold will be joined by poet and firefighter Tim Krcmarik.

Harold Whit Williams is guitarist for the critically acclaimed rock band Cotton Mather. He is a 2018 Pushcart Prize Nominee, and also recipient of the 2014 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize. His collection, Backmasking, was winner of the 2013 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press, and his latest, Red Clay Journal, is available from FutureCycle Press.  

Tim Krcmarik is a 12-year veteran of the Austin Fire Department and is a Lieutenant on Engine 1 downtown. His first book, The False Lark, was published by Diabolical Genius Press in 2013 and a pamphlet, The Heights, appeared in 2008 as part of the Lost Horse Press New Poets/ Short Books series. He is a recipient of the Paul Engle Fellowship from the University of Iowa and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Austin with his wife and son.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Join us for a celebration hosted by Pterodáctilo, the bilingual journal and blog run by graduate students in UT Austin’s department of Spanish and Portuguese. This bilingual event will feature poetry readings… and tamales!

fields magazine and the New Writers Project present an evening with Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf. This program was made possible in part with a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. His first book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is just out with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College.

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

This month’s selection is Spring and All by William Carlos Williams.

Voted by the New York Times as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination—a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that crystalizes in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language recreates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams’s best known poetry, including Section I, which opens, “By the road to the contagious hospital” (now commonly known by the title “Spring and All”), and Section XXII, where Williams penned his most famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” 

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us in celebrating the launch of Loren Stell’s new poetry collection, Topknot Analysis. With readings from Loren and also David Meischen, who will read from his memoir in progress, Crossing the Nueces: Reflections on a Divided Life, as well as poems that resonate with the memoir. He will share excerpts from his Pushcart winning chapter, as well as from a chapter published in Fashionably Late: Gay, Bi, and Trans Men Who Came Out Later in Life.

Topknot Analysis represents the layered, complex—sometimes frighteningly beautiful, or beautifully frightening—conflicts between our inner and outer worlds. The person we were, are becoming, will be, reflected in discordant and melodic poems that both sooth and agitate. A book of poems you might find in the libraries of existentialist, Buddhist or Baptist seekers, lovers and preachers. 

Son of Texas, Loren Stell, in Austin for five years, reads poems about his life-long, ex-pat life on the East coast. Leaving Charlotte, North Carolina for Harlem was Loren’s first step in a Jack Kerouac-styled journey that led to post-graduate degrees in theology, psychology, film and poetry from Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. As a journalist and filmmaker, Loren chronicled events and people from the outside. After decades as a psychoanalyst, he’s viewed life from the inside out. Writing poems about our mysterious, labyrinthine world served as a compass and reverie.

David Meischen has been honored by a Pushcart Prize for his autobiographical essay, “How to Shoot at Someone Who Outdrew You,” originally published in The Gettysburg Review and available in Pushcart Prize XLII. Recipient of the 2017 Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters, Meischen has fiction, nonfiction, or poetry in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, The Evansville Review, Salamander, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press, he lives in Albuquerque, NM, with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.

Join us in celebrating the release of the Spring 2018 edition of Austin Community College’s journal, The Rio Review, which showcases poetry, prose, and artworks by students. During the event, students featured in this issue will share their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with us.

Come celebrate the release of chapbooks generated through a partnership between writers in the St. Edward’s University Poetry II class and graphic designers-in-residence from the Risograph Lab. Authors Quentin Arch, Awbrey Collins, Davey De La Garza, Miguel Escoto, Allyson Garcia, Sam Griffith, Betsy McKinney, Gavin Quinn, and Sophie Velasquez will read from their work. Designers Brandy Shigemoto and Edith Valle will be on hand to talk about the collaboration process with faculty mentors Sasha West and Jimmy Luu.

Join us in celebrating the launch of a new issue of Echo Literary Magazine.

Echo Literary Magazine is a publication of the University of Texas at Austin’s Liberal Arts Honors Program. It showcases the work of UT undergraduates from all majors and programs. Echo accepts submissions of poetry, prose, and visual art, including photography.

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

This month’s selection is Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood, an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians.

Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz … reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila … Reading Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, ‘4/60 air conditioning’—that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair. —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

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

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

Join Hothouse Literary Journal for a reading from its spring publication. There will be copies of the free journal to pick up, a reading from some of the published writers, light refreshments, and conversation. Bring your friends! All are welcome.

Hothouse Literary Journal is the official journal for the UT English Department. They publish poetry, nonfiction, and fiction stories from multiple genres every year.

VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities) invite you to a very special edition of the Lion and Pirate Unplugged Open Mic. As well as our regular Open Mic event for performers of all ages and abilities, this month we are delighted to have a special guest, Maria R. Palacios. A poet, author, spoken word performer, motivational speaker, and disability rights activist, Maria will share with us her new book, Bubbles of Ableism: A Disabled Woman’s Journey of Love & Motherhood. (For those of you considering bringing younger children to the Open Mic, please note that Maria’s work sometimes deals with more adult themes like sex and sexuality.)

Featured on numerous local radio shows and podcasts, nationally syndicated programs, and in many international publications, Maria Palacios’ impact on the rights of children, women, people with disabilities, and the Hispanic community is as immeasurable as her artistry is undeniable.

Some of Maria’s most cherished accomplishments and positions include her participation in efforts that led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; being inducted into the Hispanic Women in Leadership Hall of Fame in 1996 and receiving the Hispanic Excellence Award in 1997; being a member of the International Guild of Disabled Artists and Performers since 2009; exploring her personal connection to Frida Kahlo through live performances of her poetry at Houston’s annual Frida Fest celebration for seven straight years; participating in the Gulf Coast Poetry Tour (2009); and creating a publishing company (Atahualpa Press). Of particular passion to Maria is Sins Invalid, a performance project of artists with disabilities. With this group she has performed since 2007, co-facilitated their Tongue Rhythm Multi-Disciplinary Poetry Workshop in 2008, and is featured in the 2013 documentary, Sins Invalid: An Unashamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility. In the artistic world, Maria is known as “The Goddess on Wheels.”

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month’s featured reader is Cyrus Cassells, whose sixth volume of poetry, The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, is out now from Southern Illinois University Press.

Cyrus Cassells is the author of The Mud Actor, winner of the 1981 National Poetry Series Competition; Soul Make a Path through Shouting, nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Beautiful Signor, winner of the Lambda Literary Award; and The Crossed-Out Swastika, finalist for the Balcones Prize for Best Poetry Book of 2012. He teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

This all-women reading features writers from the Revolution Writing Workshop led by Abe Louise Young. Join us for poetry and prose about mothering, queer and straight parenting, being mothered and unmothered, sex, Mother Earth, and more! Readers include: Angeliska Polachek, Jamie Harris, Erin Flynn, Rebecca Whitehurst, Robin Bradford, Marcela Contreras, and Kandice Farmer.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

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

This month’s selection is Good Bones by Maggie Smith.

Smith’s poem “Good Bones” was called “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International. In the collection of the same name, Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us in celebrating the recent release of Amanda Johnston’s debut poetry collection, Another Way to Say Enter. Amanda will be joined by Lisa L. Moore.

In Amanda Johnston’s debut collection, Another Way to Say Enter, readers are offered glimpses of scenes as if peering through windows and doors. Bright and sharp, precise in their Imagism, Johnston’s poems distill moments to their essence, challenge notions of what it means to fully examine a life day by day, room by room. These poems are both visceral and spiritual, reminding the reader that entry, departure, and the inevitable return is a journey that must be felt, not just imagined. —Teneice Durrant, Argus House Press

Amanda Johnston earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press). Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them Callaloo, Poetry, Kinfolks Quarterly, Muzzle, Pluck! and the anthologies Small Batch, di-ver-city and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. The recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Johnston is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, a cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding executive director of Torch Literary Arts.

Lisa L. Moore is an Alberta-born writer who has lived in Austin, Texas for almost thirty years. She’s the author of the chapbook 24 Hours of Men (Dancing Girl, 2018). Her poems have appeared recently in Nimrod International Journal, The Fourth River, and Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. Her poetry and critical writing have been recognized with the Art/Lines Juried Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Foundation Book Award. The author or editor of five books of literary criticism, she teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Join us for a reading from members of Donna M. Johnson’s literary nonfiction workshop. Readers include Jay Byrd, Carrie Kenny, Jennifer Patterson, Marcie Bruscato Poss, Beth Remsburg, Nettie Reynolds, Rosaia Shepard, Steph Steele, Robin Storey, and Mahani Zubedy.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Take To The Territory, Jim Trainer’s fourth collection of poetry and prose through Yellow Lark Press. With readings from Jim, Ignacio Carvajal, and Christine Schiele.

Singer-songwriter, journalist, and curator of Going For The Throat, a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance, Jim Trainer publishes one collection of poetry and prose every year through Yellow Lark Press. Please visit his website for Take To The Territory, his latest collection, and for music, film, and appearances.

Photo credit: Adam Glick Photography

Ignacio “Brown Thought” Carvajal is from Costa Rica. He’s a PhD student of Latin American Literature at UT Austin. He’s a member of the Latino Writers Collective of Kansas City and the Taller Literario Don Chico in San José, Costa Rica. His work has appeared in the anthologies @Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.

Christine Schiele is a writer, storyteller and, at times, a performance artist. Under various names, she has brought her passion for the bizarre to stages at FronteraFest, Testify, Bedpost Confessions, LAFF! (Ladies Are Funny Festival), The Living Room: Storytime for Grownups, Kink Ball and Weird! True Hollywood Tales (RIP). Christine also performs as a mentalist with the magic act Turning Tricks with The Darlings.

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

This month’s selection is Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó, a striking story of the relationship between a mother and a daughter who come from two different worlds and have different ideas of what it means to lead a good life.

Magda Szabo’s work casts an indirect light upon the dimness that exists between our public and private selves, a place wherein our betrayals—both personal and political—flicker uneasily over the walls . . . Iza’s Ballad should solidify Szabo’s standing as a master novelist amongst her English-language readers.
—Dustin Illingworth, LitHub

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

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

Join us in celebrating the recent release of Rachel Z. Arndt’s essay collection, Beyond Measure.

With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Rachel Z. Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the standardized height of kitchen countertops; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute. “How much can data tell us?” Arndt asks, challenging us to consider the simultaneous comfort and absurdity of our exhaustively quantified—yet never entirely quantifiable—lives.

Rachel Z. Arndt received MFAs in nonfiction and poetry from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and nonfiction editor of the Iowa Review. Her writing has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Quartz, Pank, and Fast Company, among others. She is currently the assistant editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series and a reporter. She lives in Chicago.

Join us for an evening with Elizabeth Threadgill, Melissa Cundieff and Roger Jones. Elizabeth Threadgill is celebrating the launch of her chapbook Tangled in the Light (Finishing Line Press), and Melissa Cundieff is celebrating the launch of her book Darling Nova (Autumn House Press).

Elizabeth Threadgill holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Developmental Education-Literacy, both from Texas State University. She grew up in Marfa, Texas, and now lives in upstate New York with her husband, poet James Henry Knippen. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Utica College. Tangled in the Light marks Elizabeth’s poetry debut and is representative of landscape and life in rural Texas.

Melissa Cundieff is the author of Darling Nova, selected by Alberto Ríos for the 2017 Autumn House Press Full-Length Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt, and her poems have appeared in such places as Best of the Net, Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, Mid-American Review, TriQuarterly, and Four Way Review. Originally from Texas, she lives in Saint Paul, MN with her two children.

Roger Jones has a BA and MA from Sam Houston State University and a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University. He has taught at SHSU, Oklahoma State and Lamar University in Beaumont, and since 1987, has taught at Texas State University in San Marcos, where he has served since 1998 on the MFA Creative Writing poetry faculty. He has published poems in various journals since the 1970s. The Texas Review Press published his chapbook Remembering New London in 1981, and his full collections Strata (1993) and Are We There Yet? (2008). In 2015, Finishing Line Press published his chapbook Familial, and his collection of Japanese haibun poems Goodbye was published as an electronic chapbook in 2017 by the Snapshot Press in the UK.

Please join us for a celebratory reading by the writers of S. Kirk Walsh’s nine-month fiction workshop (Sept-June). Short excerpts from novels and short stories will be read.

Participating writers include Cristina Adams, Erin Augustine, Nicole Beckley, Deborah de Freitas, Matt Holmes, Lisa Jackson, Jack Kaulfus, Alejandro Puyana, Victoria Rossi, Ramona Reeves, Siobhan Welch, and Stefani Zellmer. This talented group of writers features published fiction and nonfiction writers, book critics, and MFA graduates. For the past nine months, they have participated in an intensive fiction workshop, drafting and revising novels and short stories throughout the year. Please join us in celebrating their inspiring work and distinctive voices with this end-of-the-workshop reading. Refreshments and sweets will be served.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.