On this week's Front Table, find masterfully combined voices that create seamless stories, from an account of hip-hop's rise told in the voices of the DJs, producers, and artists who made it happen to the complex history of the world's oldest trees told in the voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. Find the following and more at semcoop.com
Front Table
November 11th, 2022
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November 4th, 2022
On this week's Front Table, explore the uncanny territory where the self ends and community begins, from a man who finds his life meshing with his new neighbors living in the glass-walled house next door to a story of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. Find the following and more at semcoop.com
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October 28th, 2022
Diaghilev's Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Rupert Christiansen
Serge...
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October 21st, 2022
On this week's Front Table, discover how one survives the apocalypse, the death of a loved one, the experience of growing old, or of losing your mind. From the daughter of a legacy of fathers who died by suicide radically imagining their final days to an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis. Find the following and more at semcoop.com
Africa is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent
(W.W. Norton, Company)
Dipo Faloyin
So often, Africa has been depicted...
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October 13th, 2022
On this week's Front Table, find a history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored; from a collective account of the mass death and loss experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic to a mapping of the criminal legal system in the Jim Crow South from slavery to present day. Find the following and more at semcoop.com
After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America
(Haymarket Books)
Rhae Lynn Barnes
This book is a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and...
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October 6th, 2022
On this week's Fiction and Poerty Front Table, find tales that blur the line between reality and our collective delusions; from a toxic friendship built around a drug that makes you invisible to the internal monologue of a woman with trypophobia recounting her failed relationships. Find the following and more at semcoop.com
Bliss Montage
(Straus and Giroux Farrar)
Ling Ma
What happens when fantasy tears through the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? In ...
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September 29th, 2022
On this week's Front Table, explore the controversial histories that shape our future, from the fragile alliance between Black voters and the Democratic party to the challenged texts being brought into classrooms to confront the harm they invoke. Find the following and more at semcoop.com
Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future
(Macmillan)...
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September 23rd, 2022
Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation
(Graywolf Press)
Nuar Alsadir
Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction,...
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September 16th, 2022
On this week's Front Table, consider how genre emerges and ends, from uncovering the silver threads & golden needles that birthed pop music to how the long history of Jewish literature challenges the modern phenomenon that is the "death of the book." Find the following and more at semcoop.com
Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs
(Simon, Schuster)
Jamie Fiore...
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September 9th, 2022
On this week's Front Table, travel through oceans and centuries studying the transformation of cultures: from Europe's eastern borderlands, seeing through migrant's eyes during World War II to the beginning of interest - what once was considered usury has now become the "price of money." Find the following and more at semcoop.com
Peace and Friendship
(USA Oxford...
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