7/08 Front Table Newsletter

On This Week's Front Table, meditate on the nuance of art, history and love, from newlyweds grappling with a diagnosis that will leave one of them as a great white shark, to a ceramic graduate’s unraveling obsession with an archive that reminds her eerily of herself, these memoirs, ethnographies and love letters embrace the sometimes wonderful way two conflicting things can be true at once. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com

Shark Heart: A Love Story
(S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)
Emily Habeck

For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He will retain most of his consciousness, memories, and intellect, but his physical body will gradually turn into a great white shark. As Lewis develops the features and impulses of one of the most predatory creatures in the ocean, his complicated artist’s heart struggles to make peace with his unfulfilled dreams.

At first, Wren internally resists her husband’s fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes? Then, a glimpse of Lewis’s developing carnivorous nature activates long-repressed memories for Wren, whose story vacillates between her childhood living on a houseboat in Oklahoma, her time with her college ex-girlfriend, and her unusual friendship with a woman pregnant with twin birds. Woven throughout this “heart-wringing” (Adam Roberts, internationally bestselling author of Salt) novel is the story of Wren’s mother, Angela, who becomes pregnant with Wren at fifteen in an abusive relationship amidst her parents’ crumbling marriage. In the present, all of Wren’s grief eventually collides, and she is forced to make an impossible choice.

A sweeping love story that is at once lyrical and funny, airy and visceral, Shark Heart is an unforgettable, gorgeous novel about life’s perennial questions, the fragility of memories, finding joy amidst grief, and creating a meaningful life. This daring debut marks the arrival of a wildly talented new writer abounding with originality, humor, and heart.

Art Monster
(Columbia University Press)
Marin Kosut

Why do people choose the life of an artist, and what happens when they find themselves barely scraping by? Why does New York City, even in an era of hypergentrification, still beckon to aspiring artists as a place to make art and remake yourself?

Art Monster takes readers to the margins of the professional art world, populated by unseen artists who make a living working behind the scenes in galleries and museums while making their own art to little acclaim. Writing in a style that is by turns direct and poetic, personal and lyrical, Marin Kosut reflects on the experience of dedicating your life to art and how the art world can crush you. She examines the push toward professionalization, the devaluing of artistic labor, and the devastating effects of gentrification on cultural life. Her nonlinear essays are linked by central themes—community, nostalgia, precarity, alienation, estrangement—that punctuate working artists’ lives. The book draws from ten years of fieldwork among artists and Kosut’s own experiences curating and cofounding artist-run spaces in Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Chinatown. At once ethnography, memoir, tirade, and love letter, Art Monster is a street-level meditation on the predicament of artists in the late capitalist metropolis.

When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era
(One World)
Donovan X. Ramsey

The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan’s war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey’s exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality.
 
When Crack Was King follows four individuals to give us a startling portrait of crack’s destruction and devastating legacy: Elgin Swift, an archetype of American industry and ambition and the son of a crack-addicted father who turned their home into a “crack house”; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an early advocate of decriminalization; and Shawn McCray, community activist, basketball prodigy, and a founding member of the Zoo Crew, Newark’s most legendary group of drug traffickers.
 
Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, When Crack Was King is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.

Magic Enuff
(Dial Press)
Tara M. Stringfellow

“God can stay asleep / these women in my life are magic enuff”

An electrifying collection of poems that tells a universal tale of survival and revolution through the lens of Black femininity. Tara M. Stringfellow embraces complexity, grappling with the sometimes painful, sometimes wonderful way two conflicting things can be true at the same time. How it’s possible to have a strong voice but also feel silenced. To be loyal to things and people that betray us. To burn as hot with rage as we do with love.

Each poem asks how we can heal and sustain relationships with people, systems, and ourselves. How to reach for the kind of real love that allows for the truth of anger, disappointment, and grief. Unapologetic, unafraid, and glorious in its nuance, this collection argues that when it comes to living in our full humanity, we have—and we are—magic enough.

The Last Sane Woman
(Verso Fiction)
Hannah Regel

Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman – a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola – to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession.

She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola’s feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?

Philosophy and Real Politics
(Princeton University Press)
Raymond Geuss

Many contemporary political thinkers are gripped by the belief that their task is to develop an ideal theory of rights or justice for guiding and judging political actions. But in Philosophy and Real Politics, Raymond Geuss argues that philosophers should first try to understand why real political actors behave as they actually do. Far from being applied ethics, politics is a skill that allows people to survive and pursue their goals. To understand politics is to understand the powers, motives, and concepts that people have and that shape how they deal with the problems they face in their particular historical situations.

Philosophy and Real Politics both outlines a historically oriented, realistic political philosophy and criticizes liberal political philosophies based on abstract conceptions of rights and justice.

Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians
(Yale University Press)
Jackson Lears

Jackson Lears has been hailed as the “dean of American cultural history” and “one of the few pre-eminent historians of our time.” Well known for his elegant, daring scholarship on topics such as antimodernism, advertising, and luck, Lears has also been a critic and essayist whose public-facing writings—published in journals such as the New Republic, The Nation, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books—have explored a variety of subjects and themes, both contemporary and historical, from modern environmentalism to liberal arts education, from the plastics industry to the happiness industry, from Theodore Roosevelt to Seymour Hersh, from Van Wyck Brooks to Anne Applebaum.
 
The essays collected here, written over the course of over forty years, are absorbing reading for anyone interested in American history, culture, or intellectual life and provide models of an engaged critic at work on topics and figures both high and low. Offering compelling lenses on historical subjects while setting contemporary culture in rich historical perspective, the essays bridge the gap between history and social commentary and afford a sweeping view of the changing intellectual scene from 1977 to the present.