Welcome to Malvern Books!
Malvern Books is now closed. Malvern Books was a bookstore and community space in Austin, Texas. We specialized in visionary literature and poetry from independent publishers, with a focus on lesser-known and emerging voices.
An Update from the Manager of Malvern Books
Dear Friends,
We’ve had a wonderful time sharing our favorite books with you over the past nine years, and it’s been an honor to celebrate the work of so many brilliant writers through our readings and events.
Malvern Books is the realization of Joe Bratcher’s vision—Joe dreamt of a bookstore that would carry the books he loved, mostly poetry and fiction from small, independent presses. He wanted to promote writers and translators of books from other countries, while also championing the work of local writers.
When Joe first talked to me about opening Malvern Books, I must admit I was skeptical. I didn’t think we’d find an audience. It was 2012 and everyone was saying that bookstores were dead, Kindle and online shopping were the future. I anticipated many quiet sales days, with Joe and I just sitting there, looking at each other. He told me if that’s how it ended up, well, at least we’d have a chance to chat—and since we always seemed to laugh a lot when we talked, it sounded like a good way to spend some time. And so from then on, whenever we’d have a really slow sales day, with just a few people coming in, we’d look at each other and say, “We’re living the dream!” and we’d laugh.
But back to opening… in early 2013, with the help of our amazing architect, contractor, and interior designer, we created the space that Joe had in mind. We started posting on social media thanks to Tracey, our wonderful digital media manager and first Malvern hire. And we were so grateful to the many enthusiastic writers and readers who expressed their excitement at the imminent arrival of Malvern Books. From the very beginning it felt like we were building a community.
We opened our doors in October 2013, and we were shocked by how many people came by. You showed up and you loved what we had to offer! You constantly surprised and humbled us with your kind words and helpful suggestions. People from out of town would visit the store because a local friend had told them they had to come by, and we received much appreciated shout-outs from the Austin Chronicle and numerous other newspapers and journals.
And then 2020 hit—but even with the pandemic, we had loyal customers who came by for curbside pick ups, signed up for individual shopping appointments, and participated in our Zoom book clubs and events. If we didn’t say it enough, THANK YOU!
All along the way, we were lucky enough to have truly wonderful staff members who loved the books we carried and who helped us build the store we have now. Their work has been invaluable and we could not have done this without them.
On July 28th of this year, we lost Joe. I can’t tell you how hard it has been to try and carry on in this space without him. Our little Malvern world has not been the same since, and, as much as we love this store and our amazing customers, Malvern Books simply cannot continue without our Joe.
Malvern Books will be closing on December 31st, 2022. It has been a wonderful nine years and we thank each and every one of our cherished customers, friends, staff, and suppliers for helping us along the way.
As we move forward, we’ll be sharing our plans with you for sales and specials. For now, we just wanted to let you know this was coming. We hope you all continue to seek out works in translation and books published by small presses—there is so much great stuff out there—and that you continue to support our local independent bookstores, like our dear friends at BookWoman, among others. But, most importantly, we hope to see you in the store sometime soon, to say goodbye and to thank you, both for being the readers that you are and because you have come with us on this incredibly fulfilling journey in Joe’s world.
With heartfelt thanks and wishing you all the best,
Becky Garcia,
Manager, Malvern Books
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 Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns, an enthralling and macabre fairy tale.
Through her reimagining of the wicked stepmother figure, Comyns speculates convincingly as to how damage escalates despite all conscious attempts to limit itself. —Helen Oyeyemi
Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful … there’s also something uniquely original about her voice. Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius. —The Observer
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. And this month we’ll also be announcing the winners of our annual Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest! 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.
“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.
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 Gogi Hale.
Gogi Hale is President of the Board for Kallisto Gaia Press. She is a member of the Writers’ League of Texas (WLT), Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and 2016 Finalist for the SCBWI Cynthia Leitich-Smith Mentoring Award. Active in the writing community, Gogi volunteers for the WLT, and continues her education through Austin Community College, WLT courses, workshops and in-depth study at The Writing Barn. She has hosted a weekly writing critique group for the past four years. Writer of fiction, both short and long form, Gogi is deep at work on a thriller and a YA road trip novel. One of her proudest moments was when a fellow writer read her work and said, “Sometimes you scare me.” Her short story, “The Choosing,” was recently published in the horror journal, Jitterpress #7. When not working on scary stories, Gogi loves to travel and cook. Lately, she has been experiencing the challenge of boiling lots and lots of water.
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 meet and greet with authors Jaycie Morrison and Barbara Ann Wright, hosted by the Sapphic Reading Group. Everyone is welcome!
Jaycie Morrison is a second generation native Dallasite who is also in love with Colorado and now splits her time between the two. She lives with her wife of over two decades and their spoiled dog. As a youngster, Jaycie and her friends entertained themselves making up and acting out stories featuring characters from popular TV shows or favorite bands. As a voracious reader, she always wondered what it would be like to write a book. Once she started, it was almost impossible to stop. Jaycie’s debut novel, Basic Training of the Heart, (Bold Strokes Books, fall, 2016) and its sequel, Heart’s Orders (2017), are the first two in a series that combine her love of the written word and her fascination with history. “Weather or Not,” in The Lone Star Collection, is her first short story.
Barbara Ann Wright pens fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories when not adding to her enormous book collection or ranting on her blog. She says that her writing career can be boiled down to two points: when her mother bought her a typewriter in the sixth grade, and when she took second place in the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing in 2004. One gave her the means to write and the other gave her the confidence to keep going. Believing in oneself, in her opinion, is the most important thing a person can do. Barbara’s short fiction has appeared twice in Crossed Genres Magazine and once made Tangent Online’s recommended reading list. She’s published ten novels with Bold Strokes Books. Her first novel, The Pyramid Waltz, was one of Tor.com’s “Reviewer’s Choice” books. It was also a “Foreword Review Book of the Year” award finalist, as well as a GCLS Goldie finalist. In addition, The Pyramid Waltz won the 2013 Rainbow Award for Best Lesbian Fantasy and made Book Riot’s “100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors.” Barbara has been the recipient of four other Rainbow Awards, and her novel, Coils, was a finalist in the 2017 Lambda Awards. Her latest novel is The Tattered Lands. Barbara lives in the Austin area with a small army of pets, and she’s not afraid to sic them on her critics.
The Sapphic Reading Group of Austin, Texas, celebrates and promotes works of fiction by women that authentically express the historical, cultural, political, and interpersonal experiences of lesbians. The group serves as a forum for lovers of lesbian fiction to discuss good reads, exchange books, and share news concerning the LesFic literary community. We welcome readers, authors, editors, and publishers of lesbian fiction.
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 Ending Up by Kingsley Amis.
Ending Up is a grimly hilarious dance of death, full of bickering, bitching, backstabbing, drinking (of course), and idiocy of all sorts. It is a book about dying people and about a dying England, clinging to its memories of greatness as it succumbs to terminal decay.
“Ending Up is a sardonic little masterpiece which, with incredible economy and stylistic restraint, shows what old age is really like, and also—far, far better than any other writer I know—what contemporary England is like.”
—Anthony Burgess
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.
“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.
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 Cecily Parks (at right).
Featured reader Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow and O’Nights, and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. She teaches at Texas State University.
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 Happy End / All Welcome by Mónica de la Torre.
The Happy End / All Welcome is set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees. De la Torre builds, fastens, cuts, pastes, performs, and extrudes a variety of poems to suit this most serious situation comedy: poems as job interviews, poems as postings, poems as questionnaires, reports, speeches, lyrical rants… At its heart, this playful bricolage explores the norms of the workplace and its notions of competence, while tackling office design, performativity, and skilled vs. deskilled creative labor.
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 Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig.
Helen Weinzweig published her first novel when she was fifty-eight. Basic Black with Pearls, her second, won the Toronto Book Award and has since come to be recognized as a feminist landmark. Here Weinzweig imbues the formal inventiveness of the nouveau roman with psychological poignancy and surprising humor to tell a story of simultaneous dissolution and discovery.
“Celebrated in Canada as a feminist classic, Weinzweig’s searing 1980 novel captures a woman’s awakening to her lover’s exploitation….Weinzweig’s prose style is sharp, particularly her dialogue: strange and surprising, it knocks every character interaction askew.”
—Publishers Weekly
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 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.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon.
The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” Autobiography of Death, Kim’s most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates death—how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “you” speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history.
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 Anna Seghers’s Transit, an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.
On its own, this story is an important untold story of the refugee situation in Second World War-era Europe, but in its own grappling with its allegorical nature, Segher transforms the book into a masterpiece. Seghers balances these two impulses in telling her story with an existential, theological layer. The situation of these refugees mimics the course of the human soul. —Vol 1.Brooklyn
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. And it’s our 5th birthday, so be ready to celebrate!
Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
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 Sasha West.
Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, West Branch, Southern Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship, Inprint’s Verlaine Prize, Rice University’s Parks Fellowship, and a Houston Arts Alliance grant.
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 Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed.
Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful—the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.
This month’s selection is The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler.
Alexander Pushkin’s short novel is set during the reign of Catherine the Great, when the Cossacks rose up in rebellion against the Russian empress. Presented as the memoir of Pyotr Grinyov, a nobleman, The Captain’s Daughter tells how, as a feckless youth and fledgling officer, Grinyov was sent from St. Petersburg to serve in faraway southern Russia. At once a fairy tale and a thrilling historical novel, this singularly Russian work of the imagination is also a timeless, universal, and very winning story of how love and duty can summon pluck and luck to confront calamity.
The Captain’s Daughter is one of the stories in which Pushkin created Russian prose…. It is true poet’s prose, absolutely clear, objective, unpretentious and penetrating.
—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!
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, Elizabeth L. Sammons, who will share with us her debut novel, The Lyra and the Cross.
Friendship, forgiveness and faith set the groundwork of The Lyra and the Cross, a historical novel depicting the political and spiritual unrest in the first-century Roman Empire. Drawing on five years of historical research and on her own cross-cultural experience as journalist, Peace Corps volunteer and interpreter, Ohio author Elizabeth Sammons depicts a world as full of interfaith conflict and difficult choices as our own. Amidst familiar characters from the New Testament, readers will find stories of a slave turned freedman, a Greek orphan adopted into life as a Jew and two bittersweet love stories set against a background of cross-cultural conflict comparable to events we witness in the 21st century.
Elizabeth L. Sammons is a two-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Artists with Disability Access Program Award. She lives in Worthington, Ohio, holds an M.A. in journalism from Ohio State University, and has lived in five foreign countries. Her love of both scripture and Greek mythology dates back to childhood. To her knowledge, this is the only modern English-language novel featuring St. Stephen as its protagonist.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
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 Jennine “Doc” Krueger, a poet and playwright who graduated from Huston-Tillotson University in Austin and, having earned advanced degrees, now teaches English and Creative Writing at her alma mater. With influences from slam and hip hop, she has won five awards from the National Poetry Slam and her play “The Coven” was recently produced for Frontera Fest Fringe Festival.
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.
This month’s selection is Angel by Elizabeth Taylor.
Perhaps every novelist harbors a monster at heart, an irrepressible and utterly irresponsible fantasist, not to mention a born and ingenious liar, without which all her art would go for naught. Angel, at any rate, is the story of such a monster. Angelica Deverell lives above her diligent, drab mother’s grocery shop in a dreary turn-of-the-century English neighborhood, but spends her days dreaming of handsome Paradise House, where her aunt is enthroned as a maid. But in Angel’s imagination, she is the mistress of the house, a realm of lavish opulence, of evening gowns and peacocks. Then she begins to write popular novels, and this fantasy becomes her life. And now that she has tasted success, Angel has no intention of letting anyone stand in her way—except, perhaps, herself.
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!
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 Ursula Pike.
Featured reader Ursula Pike is a former ACC student who has earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing has appeared in World Literature Today, and the Rio Review. She is a member of the Karuk Tribe of California who lives in Austin.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Of Death. Minimal Odes by Hilda Hilst, translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin.
If life is no more than a prolonged flirtation with death, then Hilda Hilst’s Of Death. Minimal Odes is the true account of a lifelong seduction. It is at once both a reverie and reliquary, as the poet imagines and reimagines that most paradoxical moment of disintegration—the corporeal flesh fusing with death’s own dark corpus. With a visceral-mystical poetic voice that is as teasingly unrestrained as it is intellectually sublime, Hilst’s odes enact a baroque danse macabre, where the poet revels in the incongruities of simultaneously seeking the sacred and profane. Translating the first collection of Hilda Hilst’s significant body of poetry to appear in English, Laura Cescarco Eglin renders the imagery and philosophical complexity of these minimal odes with brio, while preserving the playful tone and lush melodies that mark Of Death. Minimal Odes as uniquely Hilstian.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.
This month’s selection is The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt.
A weird wonder of Argentine and modern literature and a crucial work for Julio Cortázar, The Seven Madmen begins when its hapless and hopeless hero, Erdosain, is dismissed from his job as a bill collector for embezzlement. Then his wife leaves him and things only go downhill after that. Brutal, uncouth, and brilliantly colored, The Seven Madmen takes its bearings from Dostoyevsky while looking forward to Thomas Pynchon and Marvel Comics.
“So firmly rooted was Arlt in the explosive urban society and political culture of his time that his book is able to illuminate what was actually to happen during the first Peronist era in the 1940s and in the country’s later descent into violence in the 1970s after Juan Peron had returned as President for the last time. It is one of the great books of the 20th century.” —The Guardian
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 open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic 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 W. Joe Hoppe.
W. Joe Hoppe has taught Creative Writing and English at ACC since 1996. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, as well as two full-length poetry books: Galvanized (2007, Dalton Publishing), and Diamond Plate (2012, Obsolete Publishing). His new collection Hotrod Golgotha will be coming out soon. Joe was named Best Mopar Poet in the Austin Chronicle’s 2016 Best of Austin Awards.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang.
In Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial prejudice, sexual privilege, and the disillusionment of love through a reimagining of Barbie – perfect in the cultural imagination yet repeatedly falling short as she pursues the American dream. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that “even silence is not silent.”
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 Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater, a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood.
A strange, fresh, gripping book. One of the the many achievements of The Pumpkin Eater is that it somehow manages to find universal truths in what was hardly an archetypal situation: Mortimer peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy, so that what we’re asked to look at is frequently red-raw and painful without being remotely self-dramatizing. In fact, there’s a dreaminess to some of the prose that is particularly impressive, considering the tumult that the book describes. —Nick Hornby, The Believer
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 open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.
This month’s Lion & Pirate will also feature guests Jeff Moyer and Christopher Cook and Emmy Rose.
Jeff Moyer is an award-winning songwriter and disability history documentarian who recently published his memoir GRIT: A Family Memoir on Adversity and Triumph. GRIT tells the story of Jeff’s resilience in the face of progressive blindness. It is important for both American and Disability History in part because it documents the horrors of State Institutions for individuals with cognitive disabilities, within which Jeff’s younger brother Mark languished for 33 years until Jeff was able to pull him out and establish a supported living home for him in Jeff’s neighborhood. In addition, the book tells the story of Jeff’s role as a leader in the Disability Rights Movement and his work in assistive technology that included his role evaluating the speech synthesizer that became the speech prosthesis used by Dr. Stephen Hawking until his death. Further, it documents Jeff’s experience as a kidney donor with resulting severe and chronic pain.
Cook & Rose are a duo from Central Texas, playing original music rooted in folk and blues. Their songs of sadness, loss, and defiance reflect their Western roots and longing for redemption.
Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet by Caroline Randall Williams.
Part lyrical narrative, part bluesy riff, part schoolyard chant and part holy incantation, the book is an unflinching investigation of otherness and a dead-sexy exploration of the intersection of identity and desire. Above all it is a witty and audacious rejoinder to literary history and its systematic suppression of female voices. Especially black female voices.
—The New York Times
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 Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, which reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild amusement park ride.
Poised between Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, The Slynx is a brilliantly inventive and shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia’s past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now.
“It is impossible to communicate adequately the richness, the exuberance, and the horrid inventiveness of The Slynx.” — John Banville, The New Republic
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 open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic 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.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico.
In her striking second collection, Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limón illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the U.S. and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Drawing inspiration from the music of her childhood, her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure. Her sharp verse and intense anecdotes brand her poems into the reader; images like the Virgin Mary crying glass tears and a border fence that leaves never-healing scars intertwine as she stares down femicide and gang violence alike. Lima :: Limón is grounding and urgent, a collection that speaks out against violence and works toward healing.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.
This month’s selection is A House and Its Head, Ivy Compton-Burnett’s subversive look at the politics of family life.
A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics, said Mary McCarthy of Ivy Compton-Burnett, in whose austere, savage, and bitingly funny novels anything can happen and no one will ever escape. The long, endlessly surprising conversational duels at the center of Compton-Burnett’s works are confrontations between the unspoken and the unspeakable, and in them the dynamics of power and desire are dramatized as nowhere else.
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 open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic 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.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Meena Alexander’s Birthplace with Buried Stones.
With their intense lyricism, Meena Alexander’s poems convey the fragmented experience of the traveler, for whom home is both nowhere and everywhere. The landscapes she evokes, whether reading Bashō in the Himalayas, or walking a city street, hold echoes of otherness. Place becomes a palimpsest, composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire. There are poems of love and poems of war—we see the rippling effects of violence and dislocation, of love and its aftermath. The poems in Birthplace with Buried Stones range widely over time and place, from Alexander’s native India to New York City. We see traces of mythology, ritual, and other languages. Uniquely attuned to life in a globalized world, Alexander’s poetry is an apt guide, bringing us face to face with the power of a single moment and its capacity to evoke the unseen and unheard.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.
This month’s selection is a classic of golden age noir, In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes.
Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele. To his mind nothing has come close to matching “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.” He prowls the foggy city night—bus stops and stretches of darkened beaches and movie houses just emptying out—seeking solitary young women. His funds are running out and his frustrations are growing. Where is the good life he was promised? Why does he always get a raw deal? Then he hooks up with his old Air Corps buddy Brub, now working for the LAPD, who just happens to be on the trail of the strangler who’s been terrorizing the women of the city for months…
“A tour de force laying open the mind and motives of a killer with extraordinary empathy. The structure is flawless, and the scenes of postwar LA have an immediacy that puts Chandler to shame. No wonder Hughes is the master we keep turning to.” —Sara Paretsky
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 Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.
This month we also have two featured guests: Spirit Thom and The Old Hats.
Spirit Thom is a co-Founder of the Austin International Poetry Festival. He is an improvising bard who works with WORDJAZZ LOWSTARS, and used to tour with MOTHER GONG, KANGAROO MOON, etc. He had his own bands FUTURE NOW in England, and WE ARE ALIVE! in Australia—and Thom believes his best poem will be his next poem. He appreciates and respects THE LION & THE PIRATE, THE OLD HATS, and Malvern Books.
The Old Hats perform Original American Music and Authentic Frontier Jibberish.
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 Britta Jensen, who will be reading from Eloia Born, a Young Adult science fiction novel.
Britta Jensen’s debut novel Eloia Born was long-listed for the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. The sequel, Hirana’s War, releases in early summer 2020. Her stories have been shortlisted for the 2017 Henshaw Press and Fiction Factory prizes and she was published in the following anthologies: Stories for Homes, volume 2 and Sakura Dreams. Britta’s plays have been performed in New York City, Japan and South Korea. She holds a BA in Acting Performance from Fordham University and an MA in Teaching of English Literature from Columbia University and has taught in schools and therapeutic settings for fifteen years. Britta spent twenty-two years overseas in Japan, South Korea, and Germany before moving to Austin, Texas.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen.
Ghost Of elegizes a brother lost via suicide, is a mourning song for the idea of family, a family haunted by ghosts of war, trauma, and history. Nguyen’s debut is not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: remnants of memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space. Through lyric meditation, Nguyen seeks to bridge the realms of the living with the dead, the past with the present. These poems are checkpoints at the border of a mind, with arms outstretched in bold tenderness.
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 Pitch Dark by Renata Adler.
Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland. Composed in the style of Renata Adler’s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist’s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art.
The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.
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 Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic 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.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
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. For more information, contact Samantha Wells at Samantha.wells@austincc.edu.
This month’s featured reader is Héctor Aguayo.
Héctor Aguayo has been published in literary magazines like Al Principio, El Cid, Reporte Austin, Rainbow Groove, and The Rio Review. He understood that by using his voice he would bring representation to the Chicano experience and the struggle of neither identifying as North American nor Mexican. He’s also a LGBTQIA advocate pursuing inclusivity.
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 Magical Negro by Morgan Parker.
Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics―of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present―timeless black melancholies and triumphs.
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 Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt, an enchanting send-up of the world of opera.
Diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced “Mardu Gorgeous”) bursts like the most brilliant of comets onto the international opera scene, only to confront the deadly malice and black magic of her rivals. Outrageous and uproarious, flamboyant and serious as only the most perfect frivolity can be, James McCourt’s entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master.
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 Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic 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.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. 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 Ehigbor Shultz.
Ehigbor Shultz (B.A. Plan II Honors, Neurolinguistics, English, Cert. Chemistry, Pre-Medical studies, UT Austin ’16) is a multi-ethnic writer. Although she is now based in Austin, she has travelled and lived in many different places around the world and is multilingual as a result. She writes African mythology based YA epic fantasy, YA and adult contemporary fiction, thriller mysteries, and heartfelt poetry. She writes for all the unseen, marginalized girls and women who grew up seeing too much of the world’s pain and receiving its burdens. You may not know her name in publishing, but she hopes one day you will. She hopes that those who read and hear her work can take a piece of it with them and allow it to color their worlds and perspectives. She’s always up for a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, and is happy to provide you one as well, should you so need it.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo.
In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a “magician and a master” (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.
This month’s selection is Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi.
“This novel is a masterpiece. From the opening sentences, he is drawing on nuance and subtle detail; comedy and pathos. Every gesture speaks volumes…..for all the humour and the easy comedy this lively study of small life is as profound as a prayer, as subtle as a lament.” —The Irish Times
It is 1900, give or take a few years. The Vajkays live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house. Both are utterly enthralled with their daughter, Skylark. Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives.
Now Skylark is going away, for one week only, it’s true, but a week that yawns endlessly for her parents. What will they do? Before they know it, they are eating at restaurants, reconnecting with old friends, attending the theater. And this is just a prelude to Father’s night out at the Panther Club, about which the less said the better. Drunk, in the light of dawn Father surprises himself and Mother with his true, buried, unspeakable feelings about Skylark. Then, Skylark is back…
Is there a world beyond the daily grind and life’s creeping disappointments? Kosztolányi’s crystalline prose, perfect comic timing, and profound human sympathy conjure up a tantalizing beauty that lies on the far side of the ordinary. To that extent, Skylark is nothing less than a magical book.
The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!
In association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.
This month we have two featured guests: Skip Bellon and David Romero.
Skip Bellon writes, “I am lucky enough to have had 3 distinctly different families. My biological family, the dairy farm next door with 5 sons (my home away from home), and a nursery/summer camp where I lived from 8am to 5pm every summer weekday from the age of 2 until I turned 13, and was too old to attend anymore. Shout out to Mr John and Mrs Lee, the owner/operators. My mother and father worked hard, and a lot, which left me plenty of time to read and fall in love with words. My camp time gave me lots of experience observing people and families. Farm life taught me what was really true in the world and that’s where I developed a strong love for animals, which was fostered to a large extent by my father. A strong love of animals was the single thing my father and I had in common. I struggled through my teens and then discovered my potential (in life) during my 5 years in the US Navy. I have been observing and writing poems ever since. I added short stories to my repertoire around my mid-forties, and now I enjoy writing stories more than poetry, but still write both. Writing, my life long hobby, is currently trying to work its way into the main arena. Its only obstruction now is me.”
David Romero is a local singer/songwriter influenced by English, Irish, Scottish, and American folk music. He sings in Spanish as well and plays acoustic guitar, dulcimer, and other stringed instruments often accompanied by his wife Ann Marie on flute. His song “Absence Inside” was featured in VSA Texas’ 2017 Veteran music compilation The Re-Integration Project {Sounds}.
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 Charlotte Gullick. 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 we’re proud to present Professor Joe Hoppe’s Poetry & Prose Class reading their work as the final literary event of 2019.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is muted blood by mónica teresa ortiz.
To read mónica teresa ortiz’s muted blood, we unwrap our depleted ear, we open space and breath for our unruly ones, we write letters into the future and underneath the surface with our dearly beloved poet ghosts. This is a poetry which defies demarcated boundaries, which demands deep listening and honoring of the dead, which celebrates our small sweet bursts of joy. —Ching-In Chen
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.
This month’s selection is The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell.
This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.
“A literary jewel of eccentricity seen as an ethical provocation, which created an unforgettable shock at a time when the mental stereotype imposed by the dictatorship was dimly trying to find the first slits for a breakthrough….The writer summons, in an artistic undertaking that is ever vigorous and vibrant, the fundamental questions of existence, the ephemeral and the transcendent stimulating each other in a dynamic exchange of energy, with original and seductive accords of lasting resonance.” —Norman Manea
The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!
In association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic 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.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
We’d like to invite you to join our brand-new Suspense & Speculation Book Club, a group for those of you interested in reading and discussing our mystery, suspense, and sci-fi/fantasy titles.
Our very first book will be Christopher Brown’s Rule of Capture, the first volume in an explosive legal thriller series set in the dystopian world of Brown’s Tropic of Kansas.
“Christopher Brown looks to be cornering the market on future dystopias… Rule of Capture is not just sci-fi, it’s also a legal thriller. Its author is himself a lawyer, just like John Grisham, and he has a grip on detail that full-time sci-fi authors can’t match.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A legal thriller set in a bureaucratic dystopia as grim as anything imagined by J.G. Ballard or William Gibson.”—Texas Monthly
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on Sunday, January 12th, at 1pm.
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.
The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.
We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.
This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.
For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.
A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.
This month’s selection is Scorpionic Sun by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, translated by Conor Bracke.
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles.
“Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s poems speak from 1969 to the present with urgency, through an explosively anachronistic act of translation by Conor Bracken. As Khaïr-Eddine writes in ‘Black Nausea,’ the poems ‘offer to the future this weird / fruit / which speaks in the mouths / of the thousands of innocents dead / in our black blood.’ The distortive energies of Khaïr-Eddine’s ‘linguistic guerilla war’ agitate for a politically convulsive poetry that dares to be strange, spastic and abjectly sublime. This is a return of a political surrealism when its convulsive bloom is most needed.” —Johannes Göransson
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!
Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.
This month’s selection is Red Shift by Alan Garner.
In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.
Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as Mow Cop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe: all these come together in Alan Garner’s extraordinary Red Shift, a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening and destructive madness.
The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!
In association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic 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.
“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.
We’d like to invite you to join our Suspense & Speculation Book Club, a group for those of you interested in reading and discussing our mystery, suspense, and sci-fi/fantasy titles.
This month’s title is Dread Journey by Dorothy B. Hughes.
Dread Journey is a taut thriller that exemplifies Dorothy B. Hughes’s greatest strengths as a writer—namely, her sharpened prose and mastery of psychological suspense. While its fine-tuned plot is just as exciting as it was in 1945, when the novel was first published, and its portrayal of Hollywood’s less savory elements remains all-too-relevant today, the book’s characters and setting provide pure Golden Age fare, sure to please any devotee of classic mystery novels.
How it works:
Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you on Sunday, February 9th.
Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. 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 Jeremy Garrett.
Jeremy Garrett is the writer-in-residence at the Katherine Anne Porter House in Kyle, TX. His fiction and essays have appeared in Gargoyle, The Susquehanna Review, and phati’tude, among others, and his story “The Exhausted Pose” won an Esoteric Award in LGBT fiction from Carve Magazine. He is currently at work on a novel.
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.