On our Front Table this week, find traces of the past, including inescapable social media histories, an extraordinary archive of handwritten documents, psychic traumas of the AIDS epidemic, historical fragments that disclose fetishes, and the first English-language translation of a restored Russian masterpiece on the horrors of war and totalitarianism. Find the following titles and more at ...
On our Front Table this week, question the terms of pressing debates, including an argument that the opposition of "jobs vs. the environment" obscures the core crises of sustainability, a critique of the exclusion of infertility from feminist politics, and a fundamental reconsideration of the metrics of poverty. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.
On our Front Table this week, explore the roots of mass violence with a counterintuitive argument that empathy drives atrocities, a classic novel chronicling the 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, a history of the persistence of race science, a theory of the relation between surplus capital and premature death, and a rediscovered dystopian precursor to the Hunger Games. Find the following titles and more at ...
At the top of this episode, poet and translator Peter Filkins describes the Seminary Co-op as a Borgesian labyrinth, in reference to Jorge Luis Borges' purposefully disorienting literary landscapes. Borges' Labyrinths comes up again in conversation with the Co-op's Mark Loeffler and ...
On our Front Table this week, explore the significance of law and formal rules in social life. Start with a critique of constitutional fundamentalism and an analysis of the ways that law shapes the accumulation of wealth. Then consider a history of the formalization of measurements, and an argument that the artist should be autonomous from socio-cultural rules and norms. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.
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How do you get to the end when there’s no where to get? Authors Evelyn Hampton and Amit Chaudhuri read and discuss fictions of anxiety, memory, autobiography, and impersonation, taking us there one sentence at a time. Booksellers Freddie and Joe chime in on Co-op staff favorites W.G. Sebald, Annie Dilliard, and more.
On our Front Table this week, explore histories of gender and sexuality, including a Foucaultian account of the constitution of sexual perversions; an excavation of traumas induced by outlawed abortion; letters from a novelist who interrogated gender norms through science fiction; and a sweeping global survey of queer art and culture since the late nineteenth century. Find the following titles and more at ...
On our Front Table this week, explore the relation of society to the natural world and the natural sciences, including the geopolitical effects of climate change; the consequences of applying positivistic and quantitative methods to human affairs; and a critique of attempts to cite the "natural" as a justification for the moral and political. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.
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What might 4th century BC philosopher Aristotle and 20th century celebrity chef Julia Child have to say to each other and to us? We’re in dialogue with renowned classicist Edith Hall, author of Aristotle's Way, and the New Yorker’s James Beard Award-winning roving food correspondent Helen Rosner on how ancient wisdom, practical advice, and a decided lack of elitism are key ingredients for eating and living well. Plus, a dash of good taste (and advice) in books our staff live by.
On January 15, 2019, professor and philosopher, ...
On our Front Table this week, explore institutions of art and culture with a minimalist who subverted assumptions about the economic value of artistic commodities, a novella that questions the psychic effects of stardom on its author, a history of reading that addresses the contingency of its modes and conditions, and new reflections on the relation of creativity and freedom to maternal symbolic orders. Find the following titles and more at ...