Front Table 3/24/2023

On this week's Front Table, explore complex narratives through time, from one woman's commentary on culture through gender, literature, and more to a sister's recollection and examination of femicide through the murder of her younger sister to historical sites as a consideration on themes of space and perspective. Find the following and more at semcoop.com

A Left-Handed Woman: Essays
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Judith Thurman

A collection of essays from Judith Thurman, the National Book Award–winning biographer and New Yorker staff writer. Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman. They consider our culture in all its guises: literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition. Thurman is one of the preeminent essayists of our time—“a master of vivisection,” as Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times. “When she’s done with a subject, it’s still living, mystery intact.”

Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice 
(Hogarth)
Cristina Rivera Garza

September 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she wrote in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, she embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account—and the outcome—of that extraordinary quest. In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Using her remarkable talents as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence—handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana’s loved ones—to render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today.

(University of Washington Press)
Wu Hung

Constructed over a millennium from the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE near Dunhuang, an ancient border town along the Silk Road in northwest China, the Mogao Caves comprise the largest, most continuously created, and best-preserved treasure trove of Buddhist art in the world. Previous overviews of the art of Dunhuang have traced the caves' unilinear history. This book examines the caves from the perspective of space, treating them as physical and historical sites that can be approached, entered, and understood sensually. It prioritizes the actual experiences of the people of the past who built and used the caves. Five spatial contexts provide rich material for analysis: Dunhuang as a multicultural historic place; the Mogao Cave complex as an evolving entity; the interior space of caves; interaction of the visual program with architectural space; and pictorial space within wall paintings that draws viewers into an otherworldly time. With its novel approach to this repository of religious art, Spatial Dunhuang will be a must-read for anyone interested in Buddhist art and for visitors to Dunhuang.

Pathetic Literature
(Grove Atlantic)
ed. Eileen Myles

Global Discord 
(Princeton University Press) 
Paul Tucker 

To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die 
(The Ice Plant) 
Tim Carpenter 

To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die is a book-length essay about the essential usefulness of the practice of making photographs. Drawing on the writings of Wallace Stevens and dozens of other poets, artists, musicians and thinkers, American photographer Tim Carpenter argues passionately — in one main essay and a series of lively digressions — that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality.Printed in three colors that reflect the various ‘voices’ of the book, the typographically innovative text design follows several channels of thought, allowing for various approaches to reading. A unique and instructive contribution to the literature on photography, Carpenter’s research offers both a timely polemic and a timeless resource for those who use a camera.