6/23 Front Table Newsletter

On This Week's Front Table, we dive into Sinead O'Connor's cultural impact, explore the meaning of embracing our suffering through a philosophical lens, delve into the roots of the black working class, and experience a genre-defying writer Sheila Heiti's fictional first draft of the world's creation. Browse these captivating topics and more at semcoop.com.

Nihilistic Times: Thinking about Max Weber
(Belknap Press)
Wendy brown

One of America's leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading--and confounding--political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber's Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism's devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility. Without accepting Weber's arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times.  Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.

Love is an Ex Country: A Memoir
(Catapult) 
Randa Jarrar 
 
Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat woman. Randa Jarrar is all of these things. In this "exuberant, defiant and introspective" memoir of a cross-country road trip, she explores how to claim joy in an unraveling and hostile America (The New York Times Book Review). Coloring this road trip are journeys abroad and recollections of a life lived with daring. Reclaiming her autonomy after a life of survival--domestic assault as a child, and later, as a wife; threats and doxxing after her viral tweet about Barbara Bush--Jarrar offers a bold look at domestic violence, single motherhood, and sexuality through the lens of the punished-yet-triumphant body. Hailed as "one of the finest writers of her generation" (Laila Lalami), Jarrar delivers a euphoric and critical, funny and profound memoir that will speak to anyone who has felt erased, asserting: I am here. I am joyful.

Night Vision:Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods
(Princeton University Press)
Marianna Alessandri

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. In this powerful and disarmingly intimate book, Existentialist philosopher Mariana Alessandri draws on the stories of a diverse group of  philosophers and writers to help us see that our suffering is a sign not that we are broken but that we are tender, perceptive, and intelligent. Alessandri explains how readers can cultivate "night vision" and discover new sides to their painful moods, such as wit and humor, closeness and warmth, and connection and clarity. Night Vision shows how, when we learn to embrace the dark, we begin to see these moods--and ourselves--as honorable, dignified, and unmistakably human.

Why Sinead O'Connor Matters
(University of Texas Press)
Allyson Mccabe

Addressing triumph and struggle, sound and story, Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters argues that its subject has been repeatedly manipulated and misunderstood by a culture that is often hostile to women who speak their minds (in O'Connor's case, by shaving her head, championing rappers, and tearing up a picture of the pope on live television). McCabe details O'Connor's childhood abuse, her initial success, and the backlash against her radical politics without shying away from the difficult issues her career raises.  A journalist herself, McCabe exposes how the media distorts not only how we see O'Connor but how we see ourselves, and she weighs the risks of telling a story that hits close to home.

Bread and Circus
(Scribner Book Company)
Airea D Matthews

As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith, and his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Bread and Circus is a direct challenge to Smith's theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circus demonstrates that self-interest fails when people become commodities themselves, and shows how the most vulnerable--including the author and her family--have been impacted by that failure.

Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
(Liveright Publishing Corporation)
Blair LM Kelley 
 
There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic "white working class," a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story. With the resurgence of labor activism in our own time, Black Folk presents a stirring history of our possible future.

Pure Colour
(Picador USA)
Sheila Heiti 

Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. Here we are, just living in the first draft of creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart. In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home for school. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal--to what, she doesn't know. Pure Colour is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and a shape-shifting epic. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.