7/29 Front Table Newsletter

A true story about getting dumped, and getting over it. When the phone rang on a cold November afternoon in 1990, Grégoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that the caller was the woman who had left him, without warning, five years before. And he couldn't have guessed why she was calling: not to say she was sorry, not to explain why she'd vanished from his life, but to invite him to a party. A birthday party. For a woman he'd never met.

Here is the unlikely but true account of how one man got over a broken heart, regained his faith in literature, participated--by mistake--in a work of performance art, threw away his turtlenecks, spent his rent money on a 1964 bordeaux that nobody ever drank, and fell in love again. 

My Friend Van Gogh
(David Zwirner Books)
Emile Bernard

The painter and poet Émile Bernard's firsthand account of the beloved painter Vincent van Gogh's life offers deep perspective into the Dutch artist's process, artistic preoccupations, and difficulties. This volume comprises these prefaces, published in English for the first time, as well as a selection of letters from Van Gogh to Bernard. In addition to including biographical details and reflections on art and friendship, Bernard chronicles his attempts to have Van Gogh's work recognized after his death. Shedding light on the artistic community they inhabited, he also discusses notable figures such as Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin.

Letters written by Van Gogh to a young Bernard further highlight the significance of the friendship between the two men. Van Gogh's words of advice to Bernard as well as ruminations on his own practice, inspirations, and creative struggles are revealed in these pages. Introduced by Van Gogh specialist Martin Bailey, these texts present a sensitive and discerning portrait of the artist that goes beyond his reputation as a troubled genius.

What's That Smell?
(MIT Press)
Simon Hajdini

How our sense of smell engages with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political economy--and how it can help enrich our understanding of the nature of truth, language, economy, and sexuality.
Why is it that, in Indo-European languages at least, we have no language to describe smells, leaving us (and famously Juliet) no choice but to call the scent of a rose simply "sweet"? In What's That Smell?, a groundbreaking exploration of the intersection between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the oft-neglected sense of smell, Simon Hajdini sets out to answer this complex question. Through new readings of traditional and modern philosophical texts, Hajdini places smell at the very center of a philosophical critique of the traditional notion of truth, challenging the idea that smell is the antiphilosophical sense par excellence.

Through fresh engagements with fundamental philosophical issues, original analyses of modern literature and film, and the novel use of scientific research into smell within a humanities context, Hajdini situates problems of olfaction at the very point of inception of cultural life. He proposes that ontology, civilization, and capitalist economy alike can be said to amount to "shit management." And only by following the philosophically most deplorable of the senses, the book argues, can we better understand the central philosophical, psychoanalytical, and political issues of truth, sex, and exploitation.

Rat City
(Melville House Publishing) 
Jon Adams

After the Civil War and throughout the twentieth century, cities in northern American states absorbed a huge increase in populations, particularly of immigrants and African Americans from southern states. City governments responded by creating new regulations that were often segregationist -- corralling black Americans, for example, into small, increasingly overcrowded neighborhoods, or into high-rise "projects." The situation intensified after World War II, as rising crime and racial unrest swept the nation, and blame fell on the crowded conditions of city life. The hardest-hit populations were left marginalized and voiceless.

Enter John B. Calhoun, an ecologist employed by the National Institute of Mental Health to study the effects of overcrowding on rats. From 1947 to 1977, Calhoun built a series of sprawling habitats in which a rat's every need was met--except space. The results were cataclysmic. Did a similar fate await our own teeming cities?

Rat City is the first book to tell the story of Calhoun's experiments, and their extraordinary influence -- an enthralling record of urban design and dystopian science. Meticulously researched, it follows Calhoun's struggle to solve the problem of crowding before America's cities drain into the behavioral sink.

The Shield of Achilles
(Princeton University Press) 
W H Auden

The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden's most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry. In addition to its famous title poem, which reimagines Achilles's shield for the modern age, when war and heroism have changed beyond recognition, the book also includes two sequences--"Bucolics" and "Horae Canonicae"--that Auden believed to be among his most significant work. Featuring an authoritative text and an introduction and notes by Alan Jacobs, this volume brings Auden's collection back into print for the first time in decades and offers the only critical edition of the work.

Harlequin Butterfly
(Pushkin Press)
Toh EnJoe

A witty, dizzying literary caper about books, travel, and translation -- perfect for fans of David Mitchell and the work of Hideaki Anno. This delightfully surreal novella follows the global pursuit of a mysterious writer who somehow writes in dozens of languages.

An affluent entrepreneur named A.A. Abrams sinks seemingly infinite resources into the global pursuit of a writer about whom very little is known. Abrams' target, known as "Tomoyuki Tomoyuki," moves from one place to another, producing work in the local language before moving on to another part of the world. But how does Tomoyuki Tomoyuki move from one language to the next with such ease? Agents employed by the Abrams Institute attempt to make sense of the writer's erratic movements and baffling writing habits, but come to find that within each puzzle is yet another puzzle, waiting to be unraveled. 

How to Love Your Daughter
(Penguin Publishing Group)
Hila Blum

The seemingly inexplicable estrangement between a woman and her grown daughter opens up a troubling question: What damage do we do in the blindness of love?

At the center of this mesmerizing story is the woman's quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss--a mother besotted with her only child--arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance. Weaving back and forth in time, she unravels memories and long-buried feelings, retracing the infinite acts of parental care, each so mundane and apparently benign, that in ensemble may have undermined what she most treasured. With exquisite psychological precision, Blum traces the seemingly insignificant missteps and deceptions of family life, where it's possible to cross the line between protectiveness and possession without even seeing it--and uncertain whether, or how, we can find our way back.