Described as "a 21st-century Virginia Woolf" in the Literary Review (UK), Man Booker longlisted Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this collection that moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Lousie Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymath's journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art. This moving, fierce, and often funny book is finally about the fact that being alive means being in states of constant, dynamic exchange with what is around us, and that the impulse to draw hard and fast conceptual borders where none exist carries serious theoretical and political dangers.
Front Table 1/20/2023
On this week's Front Table, journey into stories about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art: from a collection that moves effortlessly between a mother, grandmother, and daughter to explore the meanings of maternal to a biography of a 19th century multiracial family who personified the racial myths that reverberate to this day. Find the following and more at semcoop.com
Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth
(Yale University Press)
Francine Prose
The siren passionately in love with Mark Antony, the seductress who allegedly rolled out of a carpet she had herself smuggled in to see Caesar, Cleopatra is a figure shrouded in myth. Beyond the legends immortalized by Plutarch, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and others, there are no journals or letters written by Cleopatra herself. All we have to tell her story are words written by others. What has it meant for our understanding of Cleopatra to have had her story told by writers who had a political agenda, authors who distrusted her motives, and historians who believed she was a liar? Francine Prose delves into ancient Greek and Roman literary sources, as well as modern representations of Cleopatra in art, theater, and film, to challenge past narratives driven by orientalism and misogyny and offer a new interpretation of Cleopatra's history through the lens of our current era.
The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Selection
(Harvard University Press)
Oscar Wilde
"Criticism is itself an art," Wilde wrote, and The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde demonstrates this philosophy in action. Readers will encounter some of Wilde's most quotable writings, such as "The Decay of Lying," which famously avers that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life." But Frankel also includes lesser-known works like "The American Invasion," a witty celebration of modern femininity, and "Aristotle at Afternoon Tea," in which Wilde deftly (and anonymously) carves up his former tutor's own criticism. The essays, reviews, dialogues, and epigrams collected here cover an astonishing range of themes: literature, of course, but also fashion, politics, masculinity, cuisine, courtship, marriage--the breadth of Victorian England. If today's critics address such topics as a matter of course, it is because Wilde showed that they could. It is hard to imagine a twenty-first-century criticism without him.
Doll
(Bloomsbury Academic)
Maria Teresa Hart
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The haunted doll has long been a trope in horror movies, but like many fears, there is some truth at its heart. Dolls are possessed-by our aspirations. They're commonly used as a tool to teach mothering to young girls, but more often they are avatars of the idealized feminine self. (The word doll even acts as shorthand for a desirable woman.) They instruct girls what to strive for in society, reinforcing dominant patriarchal, heteronormative, white views around class, bodies, history, and celebrity, in insidious ways. Girls' dolls occupy the opposite space of boys' action figures, which represent masculinity, authority, warfare, and conflict. By analyzing dolls from 17th century Japanese Hinamatsuri festivals, to the '80s American Girl Dolls, and even to today's bitmoji, Doll reveals how the objects society encourages us to play with as girls shape the women we become.
The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family
(Liveright Publishing Corporation)
Kerri K. Greenidge
Sarah and Angelina Grimke--the Grimke sisters--are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality. A biography of a multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy--both traumatic and generative--of those myths, which reverberate to this day.
Maus Now: Selected Writing
(Pantheon Books)
Hillary Chute
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists; it's hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture. Maus shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and has enlivened our collective sense of possibilities for expression. A timeless work in more ways than one, Maus has also often been at the center of debates, as its recent ban by the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board from the district's English language-arts curriculum demonstrates. Maus Now: Selected Writing collects responses to Spiegelman's monumental work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status. The writers approach Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions, inspired by the material's complexity across four decades, from 1985 to 2018. The book is organized into three loosely chronological sections-- "Contexts," "Problems of Representation," and "Legacy"--and offers for the first time translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus. Maus is revelatory and generative in profound and long-lasting ways. With this collection, American literary scholar Hillary Chute, an expert on comics and graphic narratives, assembles the world's best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony.
The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73
(Dey Street Books)
Adrian Sinclair and Allan Kozinn
When Paul McCartney issued a press release in April 1970 announcing that the world's most beloved band, the Beatles, had broken up no one could have predicted that McCartney himself would go on to have one of the most successful solo careers in music history. Yet in the years after the Fab Four disbanded, Paul McCartney became a legend in his own right. Now journalist and world-renowned Beatles' historian Allan Kozinn and award-winning documentarian Adrian Sinclair chronicle in technicolor McCartney's pivotal years from 1969 to 1973, as he recreated himself in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles breakup - a period when, newly married and with a growing family, he conquered depression and self-doubt, formed a new band, Wings, and recorded five epochal albums culminating in the triumphant smash, Band on the Run. Part 1 of a multivolume set, The McCartney Legacy documents a pivotal moment in the life of a man whose legacy grows increasingly more relevant as his influence on music and pop culture remains as relevant as ever. It is a truly comprehensive biography, and a finely detailed exploration of McCartney's creative life beyond the Beatles.
Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays
(Simon & Schuster)
Siri Hustvedt
Related Titles
An authoritative edition of Oscar Wilde's critical writings shows how the renowned dramatist and novelist also transformed the art of commentary.
Though he is primarily acclaimed today for his drama and fiction, Oscar Wilde was also one of the greatest critics of his generation....
In this first of a groundbreaking multivolume set, THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL 1: 1969-73 captures the life of Paul McCartney in the years immediately following the dissolution of the Beatles, a period in which McCartney recreated himself as both a man and a musician. Informed by hundreds...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The haunted doll has long been a trope in horror movies, but like many fears, there is some truth at its heart. Dolls are possessed-by our aspirations. They're commonly used as a tool...
