Front Table 10/21/2022
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 simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories that bring to life Africa’s rich diversity, communities, and histories. The stories Faloyin shares are by turns joyful and enraging; proud and optimistic for the future even while they unequivocally confront the obstacles systematically set in place by former colonial powers. Brimming with humor and wit, filled with political insights, and, above all, infused with a deep love for the region, Africa Is Not a Country celebrates the energy and particularity of the continent’s different cultures and communities, treating Africa with the respect it deserves.
Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal
(Rizzoli International Publications)
John Yau
This beautifully illustrated book covers the entire range of his versatile art, including hundreds of drawings, collages, assemblages, prints, and paintings, many unpublished or never exhibited.Brainard was closely associated with the New York School, a community of poets and artists such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter, who thrived in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and ’70s. Brainard transformed ordinary objects and ephemera collected from his Lower East Side neighborhood into stunning assemblages and collages. The book brings together Brainard’s classic subjects, such as the comic strip heroine Nancy; Madonnas (inspired by Ukrainian images in the Lower East Side); his iconic pansies, poppies, and daisies; and erotic works (male torsos).Poet and art critic John Yau describes in vivid detail how Brainard produced thousands of lush multimedia pieces radiant with poignancy, wit, intimacy, and a sheer beauty that express Brainard’s unabashed affection for the world.
Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide
(Milkweed)
Juliet Patterson
In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father’s father had taken his own life; so had her mother’s. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? In three graceful movements, Patterson explores this question. As the spring thaw comes, she and her mother depart Minnesota for her father’s burial in her parents’ hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There, Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathers—one a fiery pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman—she never knew. And finally, she returns to her father: to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of loss, and of how to break the cycle.A stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinson’s dictum to “tell it slant,” Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Rachel Aviv
In a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.
Mad about Shakespeare: From Classroom to Theatre to Emergency Room
(William Collins)
Jonathan Bate
How does one survive the death of a loved one, the mess of war, the experience of being schooled, of falling in love, of growing old, of losing your mind? Shakespeare's world is never too far different from our own 'permeated with the same tragedies, the same existential questions and domestic worries. In this extraordinary book, Jonathan Bate brings then and now together. He investigates moments of his own life - losses and challenges - and asks whether, if you persevere with Shakespeare, he can offer a word of wisdom or a human insight for any time or any crisis. Along the way we meet actors such as Judi Dench and Simon Callow, and writers such as Dr Johnson, John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who turned to Shakespeare in their own dark times. This is a personal story about loss, the black dog of depression, unexpected journeys and the very human things that echo through time, resonating with us all at one point or another.
The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
(Arsenal Pulp Press)
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
In this book, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.
The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism
(Manchester University Press)
Adrienne Buller
In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish. The book examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us - in the face of crisis - what we really value.
Related Titles
So often, Africa has been depicted simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories that bring to life Africa's rich diversity...
New York Times bestseller
One of the top ten books of the year at The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture/New York magazine
A best book of the year at Los Angeles Times...
From the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives.
'The web of our life is of a...
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled--and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in...
