Front Table 5/12/23

On This Week's Front Table, slice through the Gordian knot of how we feel when the art we love is made by people we hate; attend to marginalized voices, from Jewish anarchists to Black grandmothers; and discover a clutch of acclaimed fiction, from a stunning debut to mesmerizing literature in translation. Browse these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
(Knopf Publishing Group)
Claire Dederer

National Bestseller
A New York Times Most Anticipated Book

Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we? A passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity.

Dederer explores the audience’s relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.


With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism
(University of Illinois Press) 
Edited by Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer

Jewish anarchism has long been marginalized in histories of anarchist thought and action. Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer edit a collection of essays that recovers many aspects of this erased tradition. With Freedom in Our Ears brings together more than a dozen scholars and translators to write the first collaborative history of international, multilingual, and transdisciplinary Jewish anarchism.


Grandmothering While Black:
A Twenty-First-Century Story of Love, Coercion, and Survival
(University of California Press)
LaShawnDa L. Pittman

In Grandmothering While Black, sociologist LaShawnDa L. Pittman explores the complex lives of Black grandmothers raising their grandchildren in skipped-generation households (consisting only of grandparents and grandchildren). Pittman showcases a fundamental change in the relationship between grandmother and grandchild as grandmothers confront the paradox of fulfilling the social and legal functions of motherhood without the legal rights of the role. 


Knowing What We Know
The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic
(HarperCollins) 
Simon Winchester

From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes—this is award winning writer Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds.

Studded with strange and fascinating details, Knowing What We Know is a deep dive into learning and the human mind. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom? And what will the world be like if no one in it is wise?


Activities of Daily Living: A Novel
(W.W. Norton & Company) 
Lisa Hsiao Chen 

Finalist for the 2023 Gotham Book Prize
Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
Longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize

A searching, sharply observed debut novel on the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time.

Moving between present-day and 1980s New York City, with detours to Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, this vivid debut announces Lisa Hsiao Chen as an audacious new talent. Activities of Daily Living is a lucid, intimate examination of the creative life and the passage of time.


I Went To See My Father: A Novel
(Astra House)
Kyung-Sook Shin, tr. Anton Hur

An instant bestseller in Korea, I Went To See My Father: A Novel centers on a woman’s efforts to reconnect with her aging father, uncovering long-held family secrets.
 
With this long-awaited follow-up to Please Look After Mom—flawlessly rendered by award-winning translator Anton Hur—Kyung-Sook Shin has crafted an ambitious, global, epic, and lasting novel.


Cold Nights of Childhood
(Transit Books)
Tezer Özlü, tr. Maureen Freely

Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman’s sexual encounters and psychological struggle, staging a clash between unbridled feminine desire and repressive, patriarchal society.

A classic that deserves to stand alongside The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Cold Nights of Childhood is a powerfully vivid, disorienting, and bittersweet novel about the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion, translated into English here for the first time by Maureen Freely, with an introduction by Aysegül Savas.