Front Table

June 30th, 2025
 
On this week’s Front Table, witness migration through unlikely lenses: how plants and humans alike take root across borders, a teenager transformed by boxing before vanishing without a trace, and a Nigerian woman contending with guilt, love, and identity in a new country. Then, navigate the layered histories of race and resistance from the intersecting burdens of Black womanhood to a reframing of Palestine through global racial politics. Finally, critique adverse ideologies with an apocalyptic, satirical plunge into Californian wealth and an exploration of American literature's historically popular anti-state sentiment.
 
Posted in: Front Table
June 23rd, 2025

On this week’s Front Table, revisit a 1970s New York band that defined experimental rock, explore masculinity’s unraveling through the roles of Michael Douglas in Hollywood, and see shame reimagined as a tool for change. The, witness America through the lens of photography, hear a chorus of voices from a fractured Irish town, and follow a queer writer’s coming-of-age in 1960s Finland. Finally, meet a professional weeper in a world starved of feeling, until a stranger with no past changes everything, and everyone. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

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Posted in: Front Table
June 16th, 2025

On this week’s Front Table, journey into the Amazon with a journalist whose final quest exposes urgent truths about the rainforest, trace one woman’s life across decades shaped by loss and longing, and step into the glittering salons of a Harlem heiress at the height of the Renaissance. Follow a family of luchadores grappling with legacy and identity, and reframe King Lear through the haunting lens of Maoist China. Aboard a cosmic ship, three giants speak to survive, while Hollywood’s hidden queer voices rise from a past of censorship. 

How to Save the Amazon: A journalist’s fatal quest for answers
(Chelsea Green)
Dom Phillips

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Posted in: Front Table
June 9th, 2025

On this week’s Front Table, uncover a tale of a mysterious glow that unravels the same lives that it illuminates, walk through the streets of a post-apocalyptic Detroit where grief becomes magic, and consider the radical political power of beauty through the lens of W. E. B. Du Bois. Witness a neuroscientist’s bold call to reimagine how we approach brain disorders, and reflect on solitude and pleasure in one woman’s year without sex. Finally, journey alongside an Armenian family reckoning with legacy and loss, and follow one woman’s path to motherhood through surrogacy. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’...

Posted in: Front Table
June 2nd, 2025

On this week’s Front Table, trace the ecological and cultural evolution of Puerto Rico through a people’s long fight for self-determination, and wander an island caught between memory, exile, and belonging. Revisit an ancient biblical answer to the question of how evil came into the world, and encounter a fractured family reckoning with loss and the fragile ties that bind them. Discover a subcontinent’s contested past as it shapes the complexities of today and witness a poetic experiment encoded in DNA, designed to endure the end of the world. Finally, delve into the tangled aesthetics of motherhood in contemporary art and care work. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Puerto Rico: A Natural History...

Posted in: Front Table
May 26th, 2025

On this week’s Front Table, rethink sex and gender with a scientific challenge to the binary, and follow one woman’s journey through grief, oil politics, and climate justice. Reflect on friendship, desire, and bodily autonomy in a Parisian triptych, and cross a 300-mile-long journey that folds together history, spirituality, and many lives. Encounter characters caught in the primitive throws of modern life, and examine free speech in a critique of cancel culture. Finally, step into the ring with a woman who finds liberation in the world of 1970s women’s wrestling. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary
(...

Posted in: Front Table
May 19th, 2025
On this week’s Front Table, enter a story of art, obsession, and mind-sharing technology; follow a Harvard senior as she teeters between reinvention and collapse in a country that offers her no legal future; and witness a therapist’s deep dive into the misunderstood world of borderline personality disorder. Trace the hidden roots of American capitalism through the rise of multilevel marketing, reflect on ancient philosophies for surviving ecological catastrophe, and descend into Earth’s crust to meet the alien microbes thriving in its most extreme depths. Finally, lose yourself in a haunting, hallucinatory tale of desire and devastation as a frozen apocalypse inches ever closer.

Immaculate Conception
(...

Posted in: Front Table
May 8th, 2025

On this week’s Front Table, discover the time-honored practice of tattooing within Indigenous communities, and follow a journalist turned bookseller as he begrudgingly navigates a new career. Explore microbials that eke out a living in Earth's most extreme locales, join an unnamed narrator as he hunts down a past love through an icy tundra, and "journey-in-place" with a poet during quarantine in Northeastern Ontario. Finally, consider how actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty, and confront the challenges of the unhoused community through a priest's activism in her own churchyard. 


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Posted in: Front Table
May 5th, 2025

On this week’s Front Table, journey along ancient India’s forgotten highways of influence, and meet lost souls seeking connection in sharp, haunting stories. Rethink ancestry and belonging through the tangled genetics of the Levant, and discover unexpected friendship between a grieving woman and a wise octopus. Witness a century of betrayal and resilience in the Middle East, navigate parallel worlds of desire and regret, and enter the haunted nightmares of a nation under dictatorship. 
 

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
(Bloomsbury Publishing)...

Posted in: Front Table
April 28th, 2025

On this week’s Front Table, explore the power of muscle and movement, a mother’s fight for herself and her son, and a radical rethinking of truth in democracy. Celebrate global storytelling through translation, reimagine mothering as social change, revisit a piercing family portrait in poetry, and trace the long history of wealth and inequality. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com. 
 

On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters
(Algonquin Books)
Bonnie Tsui

In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal...

Posted in: Front Table