Author Archives: Tracey

Paws & Prose: Grand Opening Day 3!

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Just when you thought our two-day Grand Opening shindignigans couldn’t get any more spectacular, we go and add a third day of loveliness to the schedule. Yep, I’m afraid your Sunday (November 24th) has now been ceded to Malvern Books. After a couple of days of poetry, we thought it was only fair to introduce Prose Day—served with a side of Paws.

We’ll kick things off in rousing style at 1pm with a performance by Faux Paws and Friends, an awesome group of local musicians whose folk has a decidedly French flavor. If you’ve never heard a hurdy-gurdy or a crumhorn, now’s your chance!

At 2pm, Austinite Mark Smith will give a reading from his latest story collection, Knave of Hearts. Mark’s previous collection, Riddle, won the 1992 Austin Book Award.

By Way Of WaterAnd at 4pm, we’ll play host to Charlotte Gullick, author, editor, educator, and Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. Charlotte will give a reading and sign copies of her novel By Way of Water, the Grand Prize Winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Award. Set in the late ’70s amidst the misty redwood forests of Northern California, By Way of Water is a confident and moving portrayal of a community struggling to come to terms with changing times.

We’ll look forward to seeing y’all in the store, and don’t forget to check our Events Calendar for even more Grand Opening excitements to come!

Something Grand!

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Party CatYes indeed, that glorious time is upon us: the Grand Opening of Malvern Books! We opened our doors softly six weeks ago, and now that we’ve mastered the tricky stuff—shushing politely and making the cash register go ping!—we’re ready to fling open those doors with ribbon-shredding abandon. And, such is our OMG WE’RE A BOOKSTORE!!! excitement, we decided that a one-day celebration just wouldn’t do… so we’ve arranged for y’all forty-eight hours of wanton literary festivities.

What’s the plan? Well, we indicated that there might be free cheese, and I think we can make good on that promise, and possibly include several other pleasant foodstuffs as well. There will also be beverages, music (did someone say… marching band?), and very special discounts on very special books. Most importantly, there will be readings! So, what are you waiting for? Get your sharpies out, pull that Goats in Trees calendar off the wall, and put a big ol’ GONE TO MALVERN through November 22nd and 23rd.

On Friday, November 22nd, we’ll be hosting a reading from poets Joshua Edwards and  Lynn Xu. Joshua and Lynn are currently on a 650-mile walk across Texas, from Galveston to Marfa, and will stop in at Malvern to give their aching feet a rest, share their adventures, and read from their new collections. Joining them is acclaimed poet and translator Kurt Heinzelman, an English Professor at UT Austin and the editor-at-large for Bat City Review. Kurt will be reading from his hot-off-the-press collection, Intimacies & Other Devices.

But wait! There’s more! The following night, Saturday, November 23rd, Malvern will play host to a trio of irreverent poets: Matt Hart, Taylor Jacob Pate, and Tyler Gobble. Matt is the co-founder of the literary journal Forklift, Ohio and the author of five poetry collections, including the recent Debacle Debacle. Taylor is an MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at UT Austin, as well as the editor-in-chief of Smoking Glue Gun and the art director for Bat City Review. And Tyler Gobble is Malvern Books’ most impressively named staff member—and a poet to watch out for. His first collection, More Wreck More Wreck, will be out from Coconut Books in 2014.

On both nights, plan to stop by Malvern at 6.30pm for nibbles, browsing, and chitchat; the readings will begin around 7pm. And please do remember to invite all your chums… the more, the Malvernier!

Bat City Bounty

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We love to fill our Malvernian shelves with poetry and fiction from across the country and around the world, but we’re also rather partial to a little local lit. Below, a few of our recent Made-in-Austin poetry acquisitions…

Local Authors

Until You Electrocute Everyone and Into The Ropes by Deva Haney. Two candid, funny, and ferocious collections that demand to be read aloud. We’re also pleased to note that Haney is a friend to pirates.

Diamond Plate by W. Joe Hoppe. Coolly contemplative poetry that pulls off the tricky task of being both boldly experimental and instantly accessible. Hoppe teaches creative writing at Austin Community College, and he sounds like a bloody inspiring bloke.

Restless Astronomy by Michael Gilmore. The peripatetic Mr. Gilmore has lived in China, New York, and Iowa, but now calls Austin home. With startling imagery and sly asides, Restless Astronomy deftly lures the reader into an imagined world that feels both intensely personal and hauntingly familiar.

Newsworthy #1

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In which we provide you with assorted delightful snippets concerning upcoming excitements and recent additions to our shelves:

  • On Thursday, November 14th at 2pm, Malvern Books will be hosting a very special event: the Center for Survivors of Torture has arranged an informal roundtable discussion with Father Ubald Rugirangoga, a priest of the Diocese of Cyangugu in Southern Rwanda. Father Ubald lost eighty family members and 45,000 members of his congregation in the 1994 Rwandan genocide; he has since devoted his life to spreading a message of forgiveness and reconciliation. This discussion is open to the public, and we strongly encourage you all to come along. To learn more about the remarkable Father Ubald, check out this inspiring TEDx talk.
  • IntimaciesIf you like your poetry hot off the press, come in and pick up a copy of Kurt Heinzelman’s latest collection, Intimacies & Other Devices. A “hommage to the erotic in all its forms and manifestations,” Intimacies is imaginative, playful, rapturous, and, yes, a wee bit sexy. Highly recommended! (Also well worth checking out at Malvern: Demarcations, a bilingual French/English edition of poet Jean Follain’s masterful 1953 collection, featuring translations by Heinzelman.)
  • Have you checked out our splendid and quite sizable display of Green Integer titles? You really should! Edited by Per Bregne, Green Integer publishes a wide range of pocket-size books, including new works by leading contemporary artists, and overlooked fiction, poetry, and plays by some of history’s very best writers. So come on down to Malvern and get your Green on!

Green Integer

Holy Hell

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Only three more sleeps till Saturday, when you can stuff your alarm clock in the back of the closet and sleep until the cat drools in your eye! Hurrah! Meanwhile, the very best accompaniment to the midweek blues is an existentially terrifying poetry collection, and we have just the thing: Holy Land by Rauan Klassnik.

Holy LandHoly Land is a surreal and startling collection of short prose poems by a writer who describes his oeuvre as “dark, sexual puffery, blah, blah.” HTMLGIANT’s J.D. Scott writes that each Klassnik poem is like “a tiny, dimly lit room with the air running out,” and this is an apt description: Holy Land is most definitely not for literary wusses. If you faint at the mere mention of blood (or children in ditches or amputated feet), please return to your Improving Verses About Flowers and leave Holy Land for those folks who like their poetry to give ’em a short, sharp kick in the soul.

Here’s a review from Goodreads that rather proves this point:

I don’t really understand the poems included in this book. … These poems make me think of dreams, bad dreams, the weird, dark, disturbing bad dreams I start having in summer when my bedroom gets too hot at night. These poems make me uncomfortable in the same way heat induced bad dreams make me uncomfortable. Shudder!

I concur with this poor, swooning reviewer in his/her assessment of heat-induced bad dreams—shudder!—but I disagree vis–à–vis disturbing poetry. There’s something comforting in the sharing of a literary nightmare, and disturbing poetry, when it’s good, is very good indeed. And Holy Land is very good. Exampleatron, hook us up!

His voice is a tiny flash of light. A lighthouse pulsing. An orchid hanging. Waterfalls and almond trees. The sky’s pressed down: one eye blue, the other pink. He’s been dead for months. Hard black fetal skin. His voice dogshit white.

I’m on a cloud floating by and I’ve gone mad but madness flows away in a tall shining work of Art and I’m standing in front of a fountain and the world’s ringing down through me and there are no fields of migrants mixing hair and bone into concrete. Trucks lined up and ready. Cups of cold coffee, a Rolex and a crucifix. A girl on a payphone begging.

Talking to God’s like jerking off. You strain in the dark for years, but then a fuse gets lit, and people come screaming out of the fire. They land in the streets, their arms and legs blown off. A man on a horse tips his hat. Marilyn holds down her dress. In the charred air, angels hang.

Thanks, Exampleatron! But I’d prefer to hear from the author himself, preferably while he’s sitting in a bathtub with a pink wig on his head…

Nice work! If you like what you hear, stop by 613 West 29th Street and we’ll hook you up with a little midweek Klassnik. Final word goes to this lady:

Thursday Three #11

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Lisa JarnotIf you were to rap your fist on the counter at Malvern Books and say, “Oi! I want poetry!,” we would ask you (politely, although we’d like to point out there’s really no need for an oi!) what kind of poetry you’re in the mood for. And if you said, “Hmm… something contemporary, maybe inspired by the New York School, you know, post-Language avant-garde type stuff, with collage, and a hat tip to modernism, and with some nature thrown in for good measure,” we’d compliment you on your specificity and then run to the J section for a copy of Lisa Jarnot’s Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012.

“This is exactly what you’re looking for,” we’d say, pressing a copy into your rather demanding hands. “It’s feisty and experimental, and there are collages and daisies and lemurs, and it demands to be read aloud… and if you won’t take our word for it, you should at least listen to John Ashbery, who said this is a collection of ‘haunting, perplexing narratives of the inenarrable.’” At this point we hope you’d say, “Perfect!” and immediately purchase five copies. But if you needed any further persuasion, we’d throw in a couple of fun facts—Lisa Jarnot studied with Robert Creeley and works as a freelance gardener—and direct you to the three splendid Jarnot poems featured below. You’re welcome! Come back soon!

Christmas Prelude

O little fleas
of speckled light
all dancing
like a satellite

O belly green trees
shaded vale
O shiny bobcat
winter trail

Amoebic rampage
squamous cock
a Chinese hairpiece
burly sock

A grilled banana
smashes gates
and mingeless badgers
venerate

The asses of the
winter trees
rock on fat asses
as you please

Be jumpy
or unhinged
with joy
enlightened
fry cakes
Staten hoy.

* * *

Brooklyn Anchorage

and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.

* * *

Hockey Night in Canada

Oh Canada, you are melancholy today
and so am I, and here is the giant metal airplane
that fills the sky above the steam heat of my
dreams, beside decisions well between the
quiet that’s between us

and also do you think of the hibiscus
on your roadsides, Dutch, like bags of carrots
still heroic wrapped in snow upon the tiny
screens that show it to you, particular neighbor
who breathes, alive, asleep, beside the surface
of the ice, upon the moon in silver deep.