This is a free in-person event at Isis Music Hall in West Asheville. Space is limited.

Masks are required for all attendees while indoors. Thank you for helping us keep our staff and neighbors healthy.

Books will be available for purchase on site and a signing will follow Dr. Benjamin Gilmer’s talk and a Q&A moderated by Dr. Jeff Heck.

THE OTHER DR. GILMER

A powerful true story about a shocking crime and a mysterious illness that will forever change your notions of how we punish and how we heal—an expansion on one of the most popular This American Life episodes of all time.

The Other Dr. Gilmer takes readers on a thrilling and heart-wrenching journey through our shared human fallibility, made worse by a prison system that is failing our most vulnerable citizens. With deep compassion and an even deeper sense of justice, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer delves into the mystery of what could make a caring doctor commit a brutal murder. And in the process, his powerful story asks us to answer a profound question: In a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, what would it look like if we prioritized healing rather than punishment?

“A remarkable medical detective story–cum–memoir, grippingly told . . . I was drawn in by every part of it.”—Atul Gawande, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal

Chat with other book lovers about this month’s book selection.

Interested in reading ahead? Here’s what we have coming up in the next few months!
– November- “Once Upon A River” Diane Setterfield
– December- “Dutch House” Ann Patchett
– January- “Mexican Gothic” Silvia Moreno-Garcia
– February- “The Rose Code” Kate Quinn

To reserve your copy of the book, visit buncombe.nccardinal.org or swing by the library to pick one up from the book clubs holds shelf.

To join the book club email [email protected] or call us at 250-4758.

Due to Covid-19, we are posting Storytime on Instagram in lieu of an in-store event. Join us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/malapropsbookstore/ to tune into Miss Malaprop’s Storytime from your home.

Join us with your wee ones on Wednesdays at 10 am for classic and contemporary stories sure to enchant and entertain. Together, we’ll introduce children to the wonderful world of books! Recommended for ages 3-9.

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!

Maddie Sykes is a burgeoning seamstress who’s just arrived in Bright Leaf, North Carolina–the tobacco capital of the South–where her aunt has a thriving sewing business. After years of war rations and shortages, Bright Leaf is a prosperous wonderland in full technicolor bloom, and Maddie is dazzled by the bustle of the crisply uniformed female factory workers, the palatial homes, and, most of all, her aunt’s glossiest clientele: the wives of the powerful tobacco executives.

But she soon learns that Bright Leaf isn’t quite the carefree paradise that it seems. A trail of misfortune follows many of the women, including substantial health problems, and although Maddie is quick to believe that this is a coincidence, she inadvertently uncovers evidence that suggests otherwise.

Maddie wants to report what she knows, but in a town where everyone depends on Big Tobacco to survive, she doesn’t know who she can trust–and fears that exposing the truth may destroy the lives of the proud, strong women with whom she has forged strong bonds.

Shedding light on the hidden history of women’s activism during the post-war period, at its heart, The Tobacco Wives is a deeply human, emotionally satisfying, and dramatic novel about the power of female connection and the importance of seeking truth.

Adele Myers grew up in Asheville, North Carolina and has a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently works in advertising and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, son and their rescue dog, Chipper. The Tobacco Wives is her first novel.

Wiley Cash  is the New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home, the acclaimed This Dark Road to Mercy, and most recently The Last Ballad. He won the SIBA Book Award and the Conroy Legacy Award, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, and has been nominated for many more. A native of North Carolina, he is the Alumni Author-in-Residence at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He lives in Wilmington, NC with his wife, photographer Mallory Cash, and their two daughters.

The East Asheville Library is excited to announce that author Lisa See will be joining them over Zoom to discuss their March book club pick, The Island of the Sea Women. Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels including Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, and Shanghai Girls.

We are excited to announce that author Lisa See will be joining us over Zoom to discuss this month’s book pick, The Island of the Sea Women.

This free, in-person event runs 5:30-7 p.m. and includes an author talk, Q&A and book signing. Malaprop’s will have copies of the book available for purchase at the event.

Masks are required for all attendees while indoors. Space is limited.

Join Asheville physician Benjamin Gilmer as he presents his book, THE OTHER DR. GILMER, Friday, March 4, at Burial Beer Co., 40 Collier Ave., in downtown Asheville.

THE OTHER DR. GILMER: Two Men, A Murder, and An Unlikely Fight for Justice is the powerful true story about a shocking crime and a mysterious illness that will forever change notions of how we punish and how we heal. The memoir is an expansion on one of the most popular “This American Life” radio episodes of all time, “Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde.”

THE OTHER DR. GILMER takes readers on a thrilling and heart-wrenching journey through our shared human fallibility, made worse by a prison system that is failing our most vulnerable citizens. With deep compassion and an even deeper sense of justice, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer delves into the mystery of what could make a caring doctor commit a brutal murder. And in the process, his powerful story asks us to answer a profound question: In a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, what would it look like if we prioritized healing rather than punishment?

Live Stream: Ruth Behar presents Tía Fortuna’s New Home in conversation with Marjorie Agosín

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!

Alexis V. Jackson is a Philadelphia-born, San Diego-based writer, poet, and teacher whose work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Jubilat, The Amistad, La Libreta, Solstice Literary Magazine, and 805 Lit among others. Jackson earned her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Messiah University. She is a 2021 finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her debut poetry collection, My Sisters’ Country (2022), won the Koré Press’ first book prize. Jackson has served as a reader for Callaloo and Bomb Magazine, and lectures in the University of San Diego’s English Department. For more, visit https://www.alexisvjackson.com

In My Sister’s Country, Alexis Jackson artfully braids together a multi-vocal chorus of Black women’s voices across, over, under, and through time. From Gwendolyn Brooks to June Jordan to the Book of Genesis, Jackson’s poetry sizzles and samples with mischief. It’s gutbucket, daredevil, Double Dutch, next-generation sass. A mixtape of mothers and daughters, blood and beat, this book dances with ghosts. Jackson bends and breaks forms like the sonnet, pantoum, and zuihitsu and introduces the playlist poem as she explores the makings of Black girlhood and womanhood. Staying true to the beauties, traumas, moans and undoings found there, the poet invites readers to consider the ways Black women, who were once considered countryless property, made country out of and in one another, and asks the questions: What are the consequences? How terrifying and beautiful are they? How terrifying and beautiful is the rebuilding, the renaming, of country? Jackson confronts expectations put on Black women through time, family, patriarchy, and religion. “Christ is supposed to give me salvation for my soul,/ but what about my thighs, and my mouth, and my pancreas,” she writes. This is a book of the body, unbound by convention while creating entirely new ones.

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Komal Mathew is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Diode Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, Narrative,The New Republic, and others. She lives with her family in Smyrna, Georgia, where she is the co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly. For more, visit https://www.komalmathew.com

For Daughters Who Walk Out Like Sons: In this spectacular debut, notions of what it means to be beautiful–both inside and out– get complicated with a refreshing vulnerability. Komal Mathew makes captivating poems bubbling over with uncommon wisdom and grace. Mathew’s poems yield a faith of transparency and yearning, a lyric pulse arisen from the longing of our souls to be clothed with eternity, our heavenly home: “Though my love for you didn’t end / because the singing ended, the lullaby / moved to a wind that promised a nest…” This lovely book is a festival of light infused with love, bejeweled by the elemental truths in this earthbound life of family, motherhood, and human desire: “Blessed be the one who hears you cry out / like a million pressed stones – / jasper, turquoise, emerald with gold – / and uncovers your breath of bees.

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Marianne Worthington is a poet, editor, and cofounder of Still: The Journal. She lives and teaches in southeastern Kentucky. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Grist, Cheap Pop, Appalachian Review, Feed, Ethel, Chapter 16, and other outlets. With Silas House she co-edited Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, and is author of a poetry chapbook Larger Bodies Than Mine, which won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award. For more, visit https://marianneworthington.com

Skillfully divided into three distinct yet harmonious parts, cantillating local, familial, and personal histories, The Girl Singer is a collection of lyrical and descriptive poems that offer unique insight on famous and infamous Appalachian tales from this life and the next. Part family history, part music, and part nature walk, The Girl Singer beautifully weaves Feminism, Appalachian culture, and country music into one thread. Worthington’s attentive eye and heart are reflected in the starkly striking and painful images she paints in the poems. Every poem, whether describing a connection with Appalachian wildlife, retelling the lyrics of a classic country tune, reflecting on the speaker’s bloodline, or giving voice to famous musical figures of the past, strikes a powerful chord and creates a sisterhood for singing old songs in new ways.

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Mildred Kiconco Barya is a writer and poet. She has written short-stories and essays for various publications, features and travel articles for newspapers. Her first collection of poetry titled: Men Love Chocolates But They Don’t Say won the National Award for poetry publication 2002. She is also the author of the poetry collections The Price of Memory and Give Me Room to Move My Feet. Barya is Assistant professor of Creative Writing and World Literature at University of North Carolina-Asheville. Learn more at http://mildredbarya.com/.

Join us in the temperature-controlled Arena to walk on most Tuesdays and Thursdays! Admission is free, masks are required and social distancing will be practiced.

Each lap around the concourse is 1/4 mile and strollers are welcome. Representatives from St. Francis Sports Medicine will be on hand for each event and other health professionals- like dietitians- are frequently scheduled to attend. Free parking is available in the VIP lot off of Church Street.

Walk your way to wellness!

Join us in the temperature-controlled Arena to walk on most Tuesdays and Thursdays! Admission is free, masks are required and social distancing will be practiced.

Each lap around the concourse is 1/4 mile and strollers are welcome. Representatives from St. Francis Sports Medicine will be on hand for each event and other health professionals- like dietitians- are frequently scheduled to attend. Free parking is available in the VIP lot off of Church Street.

Walk your way to wellness!

In this wonderful book, Kimmerer highlights many of the wonderful lessons in life we can learn from nature and indigenous traditions. For this particular meetup, I’m going to ask everyone have read (and bring their copy of) the book. We will each discuss our favorite chapter/lesson learned from the book.

I hope this advanced notice gives everyone time to read!

Join US VIA Zoom for a
Discussion led by Brandon Johnson, Program Manager, Blue Ridge National Heritage Area
Register at [email protected]
Thomas Wolfe Short Story Discussions are a partnership between the Wilma Dykeman Legacy and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site. Our text is The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Francis E. Skipp with a Foreword by James Dickey (New York: Scribner’s, 1987). This book is on sale at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial and at local bookstores.