Category Archives: Book Reviews

Anders Nilsen’s The End

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We have a fantastic holiday gift card offer going on right now—you really should stop by the store and take advantage of our generosity! And while you’re there, I recommend heading over to our graphic novel section to take a look at The End.

In the year following the death of his fiancée, acclaimed cartoonist Anders Nilsen filled his sketchbooks with a series of short strips about loss, metamorphosis, and stagnation. They were originally released as a magazine in 2007 (and received an Ignatz Award nomination for Outstanding Story); in 2013 the collection was expanded and published as The End. It’s a raw, unsentimental, and occasionally absurd book, a harrowing collage of grief as it is being lived through.

Anders Nilsen

Comics critic Rob Clough calls the book “a staggering, bracing read.” And Malvernite Taylor Jacob Pate had this to say about The End:

I hope, one day, someone loves me this much, and is this crushed, when, I die. I’m glad, I read this, while I’m still alive. The rest of my life is better now.

Back-to-School Sale at Malvern Books

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It’s SALE time! We’re offering a mighty generous 50% off selected titles. Stop by soon, because the sale ends on Sunday, September 7th…

Sale Books

There are hundreds of books to choose from, including the kaleidoscopic delights pictured above. My recommendation from this particular table of bargainous joy: the winner of the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, Jorge Santiago Perednik’s brilliant The Shock of the Lenders and Other Poems, translated by Molly Weigel.

And to whet your appetite for further literary steals, here’s a lil’ peek at a half-price trinity of remarkable books:

The Frank BookThe Frank Book
Cartoons by Jim Woodring

Cartoon lovers, take note! Jim Woodring has won numerous awards for his Frank stories, a series of charmingly bizarre, almost wordless tales in which the insatiably curious Frank (described as “a bipedal, bucktoothed animal of uncertain species”) has a bunch of adventures in a surreal world that is both idyllic and terrifying.

HomesickHomesick
Fiction by Eshkol Nevo; translated by Sondra Silverston

Set in Israel in 1995, this multi-layered novel tells the story of a young couple, Amir and Noa, who set up a home together in a small town in the hills outside Jerusalem. Told from multiple perspectives (including an omniscient narrator who speaks in rhyming prose), Homesick offers a compelling portrait of a restless community trying to move on from a troubled past.

El GolpeEl Golpe Chileño
Poetry by Julien Poirier

Poirier is one of the founders of Ugly Duckling Presse; El Golpe Chileño is his first volume of poetry. It’s a gloriously eccentric collection of fragments, from emails and diary entries to irreverent collaborations with friends.

On Our Shelves: Open Letter

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It’s no secret we love receiving shipments of spiffy new books—and last week we were extra happy to be (carefully) tearing open a box containing titles from the wonderful Open Letter, the University of Rochester’s literary translation press.

Open Letter publishes ten books each year and runs a fascinating website called Three Percent, a must-read for anyone interested in international literature. (The website takes its name from the rather shameful fact that only 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation.) Open Letter do a brilliant job of promoting literature from around the world, and we’re thrilled to be stocking their beautiful books for the first time—in fact, we might have gone a little nuts and ordered their entire catalog. Oops…

By way of introduction, here are eight extraordinary Open Letter titles that are well worth a read… come on down to Malvern Books and check ’em out!

Open Letter 1Navidad & Matanza—a novel by Carlos Labbé
Chilean Carlos Labbé was named one of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists.” Navidad & Matanza is a metafictional, mind-twisting Choose Your Own Adventure account of several mysterious disappearances.

The Discoverer—a novel by Jan Kjaerstad
Jan Kjaerstad received the Nordic Prize for Literature in 2001 and is considered one of the most influential writers of his generation. The Discoverer is the third novel in a trilogy about a Norwegian broadcaster called Jonas Wergeland—but it stands alone as a powerful and riveting novel in its own right.

The Elusive Moth—a novel by Ingrid Winterbach
South African artist and novelist Ingrid Winterbach has won numerous awards, including the prestigious M-Net Book Prize. The Elusive Moth is a smart and funny account of a visiting entomologist’s adventures in a sleepy rural community.

The Sailor from Gibraltar—a novel by Marguerite Duras
The Sailor from Gibraltar has everything you could possibly want from a Duras novel: love and passion, charm, insight, and, above all, hauntingly poetic language.

Open Letter 2

Why I Killed My Best Friend—a novel by Amanda Michalopoulou
Amanda Michalopoulou is one of Greece’s leading contemporary writers and the author of six novels. Why I Killed My Best Friend explores the self-destructive bonds that can turn friends into ‘frienemies.’

This is the Garden—stories by Giulio Mozzi
Mozzi’s debut story collection astounded the Italian literary world with its stunning prose and heartfelt exploration of the notion that the world around us is a fallen Eden.

The Planets—a novel by Sergio Chejfec
Award-winning Argentinian writer Chejfec recounts the story of a childhood friendship in Buenos Aires through a moving and mournful series of interconnected vignettes.

La Grande—a novel by Juan José Saer
The last novel of Argentinian writer Saer (1937–2005), La Grande ends with what many consider to be one of the greatest lines in all of literature: “With the rain came the fall, and with the fall, the time of the wine.” (You can read an excerpt from La Grande here.)

On Nox

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Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson began writing and compiling Nox following the unexpected death of her brother Michael in 2000. A scrapbook epitaph, the book is Carson’s attempt to make sense of the loss of her brother, an elusive figure who had disappeared from her life long before he disappeared from the world.

Nox

A “book-in-a-box,” Nox is also a stunning and unwieldy physical object, a finger in the eye to the readers of e-readers. It exists as one long sheet, a concertinaed facsimile of Carson’s handmade book, which includes poem fragments as well as a collection of collages, family photos, and old letters. A frank and generous eulogy, Nox is a work that feels somehow hauntingly archaic and yet entirely new. It is a deeply affecting meditation on grief, and on our paradoxical desire to both seek out and turn away from the forsaken.

Here’s an elegy for Carson’s elegy, written by Malvernite Taylor Jacob Pate…

NOX: an elegy/ in a box/ for a brother/ like a scroll/ in a coffin/ mirror box/ take it out/ touch it/ damage it/ hold it in your eyes/ mirror box/ for a brother/ a sister/ melancholic/ concerned with history/ his story/ her story/ sorry/ sorry/ sad/ pictures & pages copied onto the scroll/ unroll it/ for fun/ for depth/ being dead takes a long time/ flip through it to keep your distance/ late in the night/ late in the night/ late in the night/ a starry lad/ an aperture/ a vent/ angrily/ violently/ from one place to another/ define/ explain/ as far as X is concerned/ enigma/ dark fact/ ask/ survive/ cry/ mirror box/ the phoenix mourns by shaping/ amazed at the strange things humans do/ leave behind a memory/ part of the sea/ in small white sleep mits your hands protrude/ vanish by night into nothing/ scraps/ fragments/ run away/ that dead girl/ was the love of his life/ I HAVE NEVER KNOWN A CLOSENESS LIKE THAT/ mirror box/ places in our bones, strange brother/ a tomb/ a wall in her/ this ash was a scholarly gift/ what is a voice?/ to subtract/ to take up time/ the sad one/ full of shadow/ a brother never ends/ blush/ nox/ a man is not a night/ etching/ pressure/ impression/ eraser/ for lack of a better term a windswept spirit/ he refuses/ he is in the stairwell/ he disappears/ just like him/ negotiator with the night

Pining For The Fjords

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Last night we hosted a wonderful reading with poets Zachary Schomburg, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and Mathias Svalina (more on that soon!), and so it seemed only fitting, in the spirit of reliving an awesome occasion, to share with you an enthusiastic introduction to Zachary’s oeuvre…

Zach's books

zachary schomburg very well might be the coolest dude in poetry, what with three books out on black ocean, o yeah & a little thing called octopus. & i’m sure this is old news to you. & i’m sure you’re eagerly awaiting the deluxe hardcover edition of THE BOOK OF JOSHUA.

SO: to get you jazzed for all of that let me remind you about his most recent book: FJORDS VOL. 1 &/or what FJORDS VOL. 1 reminds me of:

  • this book sold out its hardcover edition
  • this is a book of love poems
  • this is a book of death poems
  • this book has a landscape: surreal: like: donuthawks are a thing?
  • it’s funny
  • it’s sad
  • reading this book makes me feel
  • reading this book makes me feel like things will be ok, or maybe not, either way, i’m sure everything will be fine
  • dead-as-a-doornail/knob is a stupid saying; dead things have to have been alive first
  • you are alive
  • i hope you read this book

The Magic of Mirov

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Malvernite Taylor Jacob Pate is back with another top-notch reading recommendation for all you poetry fiends…

Hider RoserBen Mirov is a cloud. His book HIDER ROSER is a downpour of rainbows made of colors that have no names. The poems inside pound you in the face softly and honestly like a fuzzy blanket. The poems pound you in the mirror until you recognize yourself. The poems are love letters playing with jellyfish in the surf at night. To keep you safe. To keep us safe. What do you want? These poems are that. Or not. Either way this book is alive and raised by the sweetest of wolves to act like itself. “Now open your eyes. / Not those eyes. / The eyes inside you.”