Calendar of Events

Join us for an event featuting Phoebe Zerwick, author of Beyond Innocence and Joe Neff, an NC investigative journalist for The Marshall Project. This event is a free event, but registration is required.  Click here to register. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event. Pre-order Fitz and Cleo Get Creative from Malaprop’s to get a signed and personalized copy. Please request signing and/or personalization in the “comments” section during checkout.

If you decide to attend and purchase the authors’ 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!

Darryl Hunt is a seminal figure in the annals of wrongful convictions, both for what he endured and for his remarkable legacy. A young Black man falsely accused of murdering a white woman in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and sentenced to life in prison, he spent 19 years behind bars before his tireless attorneys were able to prove his innocence. After his exoneration in 2004, as depicted in the acclaimed documentary, The Trials of Darryl Hunt, Hunt became a national advocate for social justice, devoted himself to alleviating the “civil death” almost every ex-prisoner faces upon re-entry into society, and in time inspired lasting reforms, among them a law that allows those on death row to appeal their sentence with evidence of racial bias and a state agency unique to North Carolina that investigates and adjudicates claims of innocence. He was a beacon of hope for so many—until he could no longer bear the burden of the injustice he had experienced and in 2016 took his own life.

Phoebe Zerwick had investigated Hunt’s case as a newspaper reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal in a series of articles that led to his DNA exoneration. Deeply troubled at his death by the idea that she and others who fought for Hunt’s freedom had missed something, she set out to understand the full story of Hunt’s life. In BEYOND INNOCENCE Zerwick restores the humanity of an extraordinary man who had wanted nothing more than to live a decent life, whose story should inspire us all.

Phoebe Zerwick is an award-winning investigative journalist, narrative writer, and college professor. Her writing has appeared in O Magazine, National Geographic, The Nation, Winston-Salem Journal, and Glamour, among other publications. Her work has been recognized by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, Investigative Reporters, and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, Columbia University, and the North Carolina Press Association, and featured in the HBO documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt. She is the director of the journalism program at Wake Forest University.

The club will meet virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic. If you are interested in attending, please email [email protected] for instructions about how to attend the club event.  

Join host Tena Frank for Malaprop’s Mystery Book Club! Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!

The club meets at Malaprop’s on the second Monday of every month at 7:00 pm.

This event is a free event, but registration is required. Click here to register. 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!

Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues–racial injustice, a war abroad, womenís and gay rights, class struggle–that galvanized the world in those decades. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employerís niece and nephew–these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris–all before returning home to confront his lifeís many expectations and disappointments. Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, FURNACE CREEK leaps the frame of Dickensí masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.

Joseph Boone has written a page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic. The American South is our own Dickensian England, and Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut! – Marianne Wiggins, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen, Joe Boone’s FURNACE CREEK is a funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and FURNACE CREEK is a genuine accomplishment.–Michael Cunningham

Joseph Allen Boone grew up in the piedmont foothills of North Carolina and earned his BA from Duke University, where Reynolds Price numbered among his creative writing teachers. Now a professor of English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, he is the author of three works of non-fiction, a musical adaptation of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, and a forthcoming short story collection from BSPG, Conditions of Precarity.  Furnace Creek, his debut novel, was a finalist in four international competitions.

Elizabeth Kostova is the author of the international bestseller The Historian. She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress.

Sourcebooks launches its Booklight Events seres with a virtual Women’s History Month event with authors Marie Benedict, Kate Moore, Heather Webb, and Katharine Gregorio and host Mary O’Malley of Skylark Bookshop. They will be speaking about telling the stories of forgotten women in history, showcased in their new releases.

Click here to register for the free online event, hosted by Sourcebooks.

Order books from Malaprop’s below and receive a signed bookplate. 

MARIE BENEDICT is a graduate of Boston College, with a focus in history and art history, and the Boston University School of Law. Marie, author of The Other Einstein, Carnegie’s Maid, The Only Woman in the Room, and Lady Clementine, views herself as an archaeologist, telling the untold stories of women. She is a lawyer in Pittsburgh, where she lives with her family.

About Her Hidden Genius:

The next novel from New York Times bestselling powerhouse Marie Benedict (more than 750,000 sold), shining a light on Rosalind Franklin, the woman who died to make a world-changing scientific discovery of our very DNA, a woman whose thinking was suppressed by the men around her but whose relentless drive gave us profound knowledge of humankind.

KATE MOORE is the award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Radium Girls. A British writer based in London, she has published numerous Sunday Times bestsellers, writing across various genres including history, biography, true crime, gift and humor. She has written more than fifteen books and her work has been translated into more than 12 languages.

About The Woman They Could Not Silence:

From the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Radium Girls comes a dark, dramatic, but ultimately inspiring biography of Elizabeth Packard, the forgotten woman whose fight for her own justice brought about lasting change to science and human rights for all women.

HEATHER WEBB is the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of seven historical novels. Her novels have been Goodreads Top Picks, honored by the Women’s Fiction Writers Association STAR Award, finalist for the 2020 Goldsboro RNA award finalist in the UK, and more. To date, Heather’s books have been translated to over a dozen languages. She lives in New England with her family and one feisty rabbit.

About The Next Ship Home:

A thoughtful historical novel inspired by true events and for fans of Kristina McMorris and Hazel Gaynor about dark secrets of Ellis Island, when entry promised a better life but often delivered something drastically different, and when immigrant strength and female friendship found ways to triumph even on the darkest days.

KATHARINE GREGORIO, the great-niece of Katharine Clark, holds a BA in History from Dartmouth College, an MSc in International Relations from The London School of Economics and Political Science, and an MBA from The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. She currently works in product marketing for Adobe.

About The Double Life of Katharine Clark:

A gripping biography that illuminates a remarkable chapter of the 20th century, one that shows how an unwavering commitment to truth, justice, and freedom of the press prevailed even in the hardest of circumstances. It is the untold story of Katharine Clark, a woman who forged a career in a male-dominated profession and risked her life to expose the truth about Communism to the world. Written by Katharine’s great-niece.

Mary Webber O’Malley is a writer and a Virtual Bookseller for Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Missouri, reading and blurbing books across many genres. She is also the Author Liaison and Scheduling Producer for A Mighty Blaze, and co-host of the Blaze Boudoir. When not reading or writing, Mary and her husband love spending time with their grandchildren and tending their little suburban homestead outside Chicago, Illinois. She can be found on FB and Instagram @Blurb_Your_Enthusiasm.

Join us for a special virtual Miss Malaprop’s Storytime event with Alice Faye Duncan!

Duncan will share a short video reading from Opal Lee and What It Means to Be Free, read from the book, Just Like A Mama, and lead a poetry writing activity.

Registration is not required for this event, but you can RSVP here to receive a reminder email with the YouTube link. To attend the event, please go to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/MalapropsBookstoreCafe

Every year, Opal looked forward to the Juneteenth picnic–a drumming, dancing, delicious party. She knew from Granddaddy Zak’s stories that Juneteenth celebrated the day the freedom news of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation finally sailed into Texas in 1865–over two years after the president had declared it! But Opal didn’t always see freedom in her Texas town. Then one Juneteenth day when Opal was twelve years old, an angry crowd burned down her brand-new home. This wasn’t freedom at all. She had to do something! Opal Lee spent the rest of her life speaking up for equality and unity. She became a teacher, a charity worker, and a community leader. At the age of 89, she walked from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, D.C., in an effort to gain national recognition for Juneteenth.

Featuring the illustrations of New York Times bestselling illustrator Keturah A. Bobo (I am Enough), Opal Lee and What It Means to Be Free celebrates the life and legacy of a modern-day Black leader while sharing a message of hope, unity, joy, and strength.

Alice Faye Duncan is a National Board Certified Teacher, who writes for young learners. Memory is her motivation. She writes to help children remember important moments from African American history. Her books are celebrated for vivid imagery and lyrical texts that sound like music. Alice’s most popular titles include A Song for Gwendolyn Brooks; Just Like a Mama; Honey Baby Sugar Child; and Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop, which received a 2019 Coretta Scott King Honor Medal. Alice lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where at a young age, her mother nurtured her writing talent with prayer, poetry books, and praise. Her website is www.alicefayeduncan.com.