Calendar of Events

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited amount of seats available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

To celebrate the upcoming release of her short story collection McMullen Circle, finalist for the W.S. Porter Prize, Heather Newton is hosting a giveaway of fun North Georgia swag! If you pre-order and email proof of purchase to [email protected] you’ll be entered to win the gift box! The drawing will take place on November 30, 2021 at noon Eastern time. If you’re the winner Heather will contact you for your U.S. mailing address (sorry, can’t mail it outside of the fifty states).

Like most of our events, this event is free. 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!

The twelve linked stories in McMullen Circle explore the intertwined lives of faculty families at the McMullen Boarding School in Tonola Falls, Georgia in 1969-70. The school community is isolated and idyllic, yet issues of race and the Vietnam War still intrude. Does heroism require physical prowess, or is there valor in a cafeteria worker enduring a cluttered, needy life with her four young sons, or an elderly librarian caring for her disabled lesbian partner? What does it take for a young African American girl to find the courage to assert her right to attend the all-white private school? The stories in this collection ask what, and who, are the real heroes.

Heather Newton’s novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection, and named an “Okra Pick” by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. Her short prose has appeared in Enchanted Conversation Magazine, The Drum, Dirty Spoon, and elsewhere. A practicing attorney, she teaches creative writing for UNC-Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and is co-founder and Program Manager for the Flatiron Writers Room writers’ center in Asheville, NC. www.heathernewton.net

Tessa Fontaine‘s writing has appeared in PANK, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, Sideshow World, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and is working on a PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah. She also eats fire and charms snakes, among other sideshow feats. She lives in South Carolina. The Electric Woman is her first book.

Join Keith Flynn and Charter Weeks presenting Prosperity Gospel. Flynn will also read from his previous book Skin of Meaning. 

Like most of our events, this event is free, but registration is required. Click here to RSVP for this event. Prior to the event the link required to attend will be emailed to registrants.

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!

Keith Flynn and Charter Weeks have added to the long tradition in the US of documenting the pitfalls of unbridled capitalism. From Lewis Hine photographing child labor in textile mills to Walker Evans and James Agee publishing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men during the Great Depression, and to Eugene Richards documenting the decline of communities across the American West–Prosperity Gospel adds to this tradition with photographs and text that remind us that this nation is a land of opportunity for some and a land of hard work, low pay, and decaying communities for many. Both the Great Recession that began in 2008 by the greed of an unregulated banking industry and the more recent global pandemic that has devastated communities across America provide the backdrop for these remarkable portraits and testimonies of the people who do their best to survive when the odds are so stacked against them. Kudos to Flynn and Weeks for this important contribution to American literature. —Glenn Ruga, Founder & Director Social Documentary Network

The Skin of Meaning is award-winning poet Keith Flynn’s sixth and most wide-ranging collection, seeking to find the tangible analogs and visceral meanings behind the daily bombardment of digital information, hoping to restore the mystery in our involvement with language, constantly challenging our assumptions about the world we think we see, and providing evidence of another invisible one bristling like an underground river beneath our feet.

Keith Flynn Flynn is also the author of seven books, six collections of poetry. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The American Literary Review, Ecotone, Cave Wall, The Poetics of American Song Lyrics, The Carolina Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Cuirt Journal (Ireland), Earth and Soul: The Kostroma Anthology (Russia), The 20th Century Anthology of NC Poets, Poetry Wales, Takahe (New Zealand), Margie, Shenandoah, Quarterly Review (Singapore), Rattle, and The Southern Poetry Review. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award, was awarded the Paumanok Poetry Prize in 1996, and the 2013 North Carolina Literary Fellowship. Flynn has given thousands of performances from his work across North America and abroad.  In 2005 and 2006, Flynn served as the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for North Carolina, working to promote the cultural importance of poetry in his home state. He is also the founder and editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, a literary journal established in 1994 that has published over 1,500 writers from 22 countries.

Charter Weeks has been a documentary photographer for nearly 50 years and formerly worked as a commercial photographer and filmmaker in NYC in the 1960s working for major agencies and the BBC. He’s worked in Europe, Asia, Africa, Central America. His photography has been exhibited in galleries around the US and appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Virginia Quarterly Review, South Loop, Hanging Loose, Graphis design, and Corvette Fever among others. For the past 3 years, he has worked with the North Carolina writer Keith Flynn, documenting the effects of this recession on an area of Appalachia around Asheville.

Malaprop’s Founder Emoke Bracz will discuss the book, Hungarian Refugee with Malaprop’s Bookseller, Charles Lee.

This is a virtual event. Registration is required. Please click here to register. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Like most of our events, this event is free. 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!

While the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 may be largely forgotten by many in America, it is definitely not forgotten by the Hungarian people who lived through it, were exiled because of it, or lost friends or family members to the merciless Soviet invasion that extinguished it. In the 1957 interview of Istvan B’Racz, the youngest elected member of the Parliament on the subjects of the revolt of 1956, personal life and work experience, social problems and education, government, police, communications, ideology, attitudes, opinions, and timeline from journal. He was also president of the Independent Youth Party, Small Landowners Party.

Emoke Bracz is our beloved store founder and co-owner. She is also an accomplished poet- and her book, Every Tree is the Forest, can be found on our shelves in the poetry section.

Charles Lee is an Asheville native and Malarop’s Bookseller and teaches French at UNCA. He has an MA in German Studies from the Sorbonne, and an MPhil in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle. He has worked in various parts of the publishing world, mainly in France and Britain. When not selling books, he is a translator from French, German and Spanish.

Like most of our events, this event is free, but registration is required. Click here to RSVP for this event. Prior to the event the link required to attend will be emailed to registrants.

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!

In 1926 in rural Green County, Arkansas, where cotton and poverty reign, young Coralee Harper hopes for a family and a place in her community, but when her brother Buddy is killed by a powerful sheriff, she can’t recover from his death or the injustice of his loss. When she begins to spot her dead brother around town, she wonders–is she clairvoyant, mistaken, or is she losing her mind?

What Coralee can’t fathom is that there are forces at work that threaten her and the very fabric of the town: Leroy Harrison, a newly minted, ambitious lawyer who makes a horrible mistake, landing him a judgeship and a guilty conscience for life; an evangelical preacher and his flock of snake-handling parishioners; the women of the town who, along with Coralee’s own mother, make up their own kind of jury for Coralee’s behavior; Sheriff Wiley Slocum who rules the entire field, harboring dark secrets of his own; and finally, Coralee’s husband Earl, who tries to balance his work at the cotton gin with his fight for family and Coralee’s life.

When Coralee ends up in a sanity hearing before Judge Leroy Harrison, the judge must decide both Coralee’s fate and his own. The chain of events following his decision draws him more deeply into the sheriff’s far-reaching sphere of influence and reveals the destructive nature of power, even–and especially–his own.

Mary Elizabeth Pope grew up in Michigan with roots deep in the Missouri Bootheel and Northeast Arkansas. She is Professor of English at Emmanuel College in Boston. She is the author of Divining Venus: Stories, and her work has been featured in the literary magazines Arkansas Review, Florida Review, Bellingham Review, Ascent, Passages North, and Fugue, among others. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. She lives outside Boston with her husband.

Jill McCorkle’s first two novels were released simultaneously when she was just out of college, and the New York Times called her “a born novelist.” Since then, she has published five other novels and four collections of short stories, and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories several times, as well as The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books, and her novel, Life After Life, was a New York Times bestseller. She has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, The Atlantic, and other publications. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard, where she also chaired the department of creative writing. She is currently a faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

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!

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 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!

Beloved by readers for his sensitivity and focus on iconic LGBTQ characters and serious issues, Greg Howard makes his highly-anticipated return with middle-grade novel, The Visitors, a heartrending story of hope, hard-won truths, and the healing power of forgiveness. We will have bookplates signed by Greg Howard and Alan Gratz will offer signed or personalized copies of his books. Please indicate your interest in the comments section during checkout.

In The Visitors, a lonely twelve-year-old boy spends his days “stuck” at the deserted Hollow Pines Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina with no recollection of his name, how long he’s been there, and no idea how to leave. Things never change much for the lost souls at Hollow Pines and time is strange when you’re dead. But when visitors from the living world arrive for the first time in a long while, the boy feels a spark of hope. These visitors are around his age, and they seem to understand more than others that the plantation is not just spooky or eerie, it’s a sad place where the unspeakable happened again and again. As the visitors investigate a mystery of their own for a podcast for a school project, the boy’s long-buried memories begin to shake loose. He wonders if maybe they could help him uncover the dark secrets of his past in hopes of finding a way to finally move on. But Hollow Pines doesn’t like visitors. And with a malevolent spirit lurking in the shadows and painful memories buried deep, and for good reason, the boy wonders if he’ll ever find his way home or be stuck at Hollow Pines forever.Hauntingly beautiful and filled with lyrical prose that will spark critical thinking and encourage meaningful conversations on the subjects of slavery and suicide, THE VISITORS will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.

Born and raised in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Greg Howard’s love of words and story blossomed at a young age. Originally set on becoming a famous songwriter and following that dream to the bright lights of Nashville, Tennessee, Greg spent years producing the music of others before eventually returning to his childhood passion of writing stories. Greg writes young adult and middle grade novels focusing on LGBTQ characters and issues. He has an unhealthy obsession with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and currently resides in Nashville with his three rescued fur babies–Molly, Toby, and Riley.

Alan Gratz is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of several highly acclaimed books for young readers, including Ground Zero, Allies, Grenade, Refugee, Projekt 1065, Prisoner B-3087, and Code of Ho