Calendar of Events

On the day of the event, we will send a reminder email with the link required to attend.

Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

The Promise of the Pelican, (Arcade, distributed by Simon & Schuster), is an intergenerational, multicultural South, literary crime novel set on the Alabama coast, with back stories in Amsterdam and Central America. An 82-year old retired defense attorney, Hank Weinberg, a child Holocaust survivor from Amsterdam, is summoned back into action to take up the cause of a young Honduran worker at a local resort hotel, accused of a murder. “The Promise of the Pelican” is not only a crime novel, but also a novel that’s Jewish, Southern, global, and attuned to issues of social justice.

Roy Hoffman is author of the new novel The Promise of the Pelican, a literary crime novel of today’s multicultural South, the novels Come Landfall, Chicken Dreaming Corn, praised by Harper Lee, and Almost Family, and the nonfiction Alabama Afternoons and Back Home. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall St. Journal, and he was a journalist and speechwriter in New York before returning south to reside in Fairhope, Ala., near his hometown, Mobile. A recipient of the Lillian Smith Award in fiction and Clarence Cason Award in nonfiction, Roy is on the faculty of Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. On the web: www.royhoffmanwriter.com

Mallory McDuff teaches environmental education at Warren Wilson College outside Asheville, North Carolina. With her two daughters, she lives on campus in a 900-square-foot house with an expansive view of the Appalachian mountains. She is the author of four books, including Natural Saints: How People of Faith Are Working to Save God’s Earth. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Sojourners, and more.

Join us for a virtual evening with Mary Laura Philpott & Kimberly Williams-Paisley, hosted by Books & Books/Miami Book Fair + indie bookstore partners on Wednesday, April 20th at 8:00 PM ET. 

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Tickets are $27.00 each (plus applicable tax and shipping). Each ticket includes an unsigned hardcover copy of Mary Laura Philpott’s new book, Bomb Shelter and a link to access the live event.

Please make sure you submit the correct email address with your ticket purchase and that your email filters will allow messages from addresses @malaprops.com. The link required to attend will be emailed to you prior to the event.

NOTE: Books bundled with event tickets may be shipped ONLY to United States addresses. Books will not be shipped before publication date, April 12, 2022. Postal delivery times vary.

A lifelong worrier, Philpott always kept an eye out for danger, a habit that only intensified when she became a parent. But she looked on the bright side, too, believing that as long as she cared enough, she could keep her loved ones safe. Then, in the dark of one quiet, pre-dawn morning, she woke abruptly to a terrible sound–and found her teenage son unconscious on the floor. In the aftermath of a crisis that darkened her signature sunny spirit, she wondered: If this happened, what else could happen? And how do any of us keep going when we can’t know for sure what’s coming next? Leave it to the writer whose critically acclaimed debut had us “laughing and crying on the same page” (NPR) to illuminate what it means to move through life with a soul made of equal parts anxiety and optimism (and while she’s at it, to ponder the mysteries of backyard turtles and the challenges of spatchcocking a turkey).

Hailed by The Washington Post as “Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin all rolled into one,” Philpott returns in her distinctive voice to explore our protective instincts, the ways we continue to grow up long after we’re grown, and the limits–both tragic and hilarious–of the human body and mind.

MARY LAURA PHILPOTT, author of the national bestseller I Miss You When I Blink, writes essays that examine the overlap of the absurd and the profound in everyday life. Her writing has been featured frequently by The New York Times and appears in such outlets as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Real Simple, and more. A former bookseller, she also hosted an interview program on Nashville Public Television for several years. Mary Laura lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family.   

KIMBERLY WILLIAMS-PAISLEY is an actress, New York Times Best Selling author, Alzheimer’s advocate, and co-founder of non-profit, The Store, an organization in Nashville which aims to address food insecurity. Williams-Paisley’s memoir Where The Light Gets In: Losing My Mother Only to Find Her Again, chronicling her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, came out in 2016 and hit the New York Times Bestseller list. She is a global ambassador for CARE International, traveling to Haiti and Guatemala to follow U.S. funding for programs that support women and children.

Join host and Malaprop’s Bookseller Allison to dive into the wreck of the wily and wonderful world of science fiction, fantasy, weird fiction, speculative fiction, and literary horror with a healthy mix of underappreciated classic and contemporary books. Meets the last Monday of every month at 7 pm on Zoom. Also meets on the second Monday of every month at 7 pm to discuss the film adaptations of the books we read.  Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading and contact the club host to join. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!

Booklight Events from Sourcebooks presents two powerhouse thriller authors, Julie Clark and Carter Wilson, as they are in-conversation about their newest releases.

Julie Clark is the New York Times bestselling author of The Ones We Choose and The Last Flight, which was also a #1 international bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and a golden doodle with poor impulse control.

Carter Wilson is the USA Today and #1 Denver Post bestselling author of multiple critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thrillers. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a four-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his novels have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. Carter lives outside of Boulder, Colorado.

The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Wallace Stegner called national parks “the best idea we ever had.” As Americans celebrate the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, a question naturally arises: where did the idea for a national park originate? The answer starts with a look at pre-Yellowstone America. With nothing to put up against Europe’s cultural pearls–its cathedrals, castles, and museums–Americans came to realize that their plentitude of natural wonders might compensate for the dearth of manmade attractions. That insight guided the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted as he organized his thoughts on how to manage the wilderness park centered on Yosemite Valley, a state-owned predecessor to the national park model of Yellowstone. Haunting those thoughts were the cluttered and carnival-like banks of Niagara Falls, which served as an oft-cited example of what should not happen to a spectacular natural phenomenon.

Olmsted saw city parks as vital to the pursuit of happiness and wanted them to be established for all to enjoy. When he wrote down his philosophy for managing Yosemite, a new and different kind of park, one that preserves a great natural site in the wilds, he had no idea that he was creating a visionary blueprint for national parks to come. Dennis Drabelle provides a history of the national park concept, adding to our understanding of American environmental thought and linking Olmsted with three of the country’s national treasures. Published in time to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone National Park on March 1, 2022, and the 200th birthday of Frederick Law Olmsted on April 26, 2022, The Power of Scenery tells the fascinating story of how the national park movement arose, evolved, and has spread around the world.

Dennis Drabelle is a writer and former attorney. During the 1970s he was an attorney-adviser at the U.S. Department of the Interior and counsel to the assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks. Drabelle was a contributing editor of the Washington Post Book World for more than thirty years. His books include Mile High Fever: Silver Mines, Boom Towns, and High Living on the Comstock Lode and The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad. His articles on the environment and national parks have appeared in Outside, Smithsonian, Sierra, Wilderness, Backpacker, and many other magazines.

The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

In May 1996, Julie Williams and Lollie Winans were brutally murdered while backpacking in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, adjacent to the world-famous Appalachian Trail. The young women were skilled backcountry leaders and they had met–and fallen in love–the previous summer, while working at a world-renowned outdoor program for women. But despite an extensive joint investigation by the FBI, the Virginia police, and National Park Service experts, the case remained unsolved for years. In early 2002 and in response to mounting political pressure, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he would be seeking the death penalty against Darrell David Rice–already in prison for assaulting another woman–in the first capital case tried under new, post-9/11 federal hate crime legislation. But two years later, the Department of Justice quietly suspended its case against Rice, and the investigation has since grown cold. Did prosecutors have the right person?

Journalist Kathryn Miles was a professor at Lollie Winans’s wilderness college in Maine when the 2002 indictment was announced. On the 20th anniversary of the murder, she began looking into the lives of these adventurous women–whose loss continued to haunt all who had encountered them–along with the murder investigation and subsequent case against Rice. As she dives deeper into the case, winning the trust of the victims’ loved ones as well as investigators and gaining access to key documents, Miles becomes increasingly obsessed with the loss of the generous and free-spirited Lollie and Julie, who were just on the brink of adulthood, and at the same time she discovers evidence of cover-ups, incompetence, and crime-scene sloppiness that seemed part of a larger problem in America’s pursuit of justice in national parks. She also becomes convinced of Rice’s innocence, and zeroes in on a different likely suspect.

Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders is a riveting, eye-opening, and heartbreaking work, offering a braided narrative about two remarkable women who were murdered doing what they most loved, the forensics of this cold case, and the surprising pervasiveness and long shadows cast by violence against women in the backcountry.

Kathryn Miles is the author of five books . Her essays and articles have appeared in publications such as Audubon, Best American Essays, Best American Sports Writing, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Outside, Politico, and Time. A contributing editor at Down East magazine, Miles also serves as a scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council and as a faculty member in several MFA programs. Her website is www.kathrynmiles.net.