Front Table - 6/17/22

On our Front Table this week, inspect symbols with multiple meanings, from the multifaceted realities of testosterone to variegated memories of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com

Old Truths and New Clichés: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Princeton University Press)
Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. David Stromberg

Old Truths and New Clichés collects nineteen essays—most of them previously unpublished in English—by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic vision throughout an astonishing and prolific literary career spanning more than six decades. Expanding on themes reflected in his best-known work—including the literary arts, Yiddish and Jewish life, and mysticism and philosophy—the book illuminates in new ways the rich intellectual, aesthetic, religious, and biographical background of Singer's singular achievement as the first Yiddish-language author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet these essays, which Singer himself translated into English or oversaw the translation of, present his ideas in a new way, as universal reflections on the role of the artist in modern society.

Scent: A Natural History of Fragrance (Yale University Press)
Elise Vernon Pearlstine

Plants have long harnessed the chemical characteristics of aromatic compounds to shape the world around them. Only recently in the evolutionary history of plants, however, have humans learned to co-opt their fragrances to seduce, heal, protect, and alter moods themselves. In this wide-ranging and accessible new book, biologist-turned-perfumer Elise Vernon Pearlstine turns our human-centered perception of fragrance on its head and investigates plants' evolutionary reasons for creating aromatic molecules. Delving into themes of spirituality, wealth, power, addiction, royalty, fantasy, and more, Pearlstine uncovers the natural history of aromatic substances and their intersection with human culture and civilization.

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Press)
Ada Calhoun

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier. As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's, and her own. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond.

On the Poverty of Student Life: Considered in Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for Its Remedy (Common Notions)
The Situationist International

When the Situationist International was a little known revolutionary art group, before Guy Debord's philosophical masterpiece Society of the Spectacle was published, and before Paris' universities were occupied in May '68, On the Poverty of Student Life was a match that recognized and described student and youth alienation, and the way it was printed and distributed spread that fire. This new edition highlights its global underground circulation and brings attention to the common conditions of students, workers, and anti-imperialist resistance in the world of the sixties—bringing that historic reckoning to the present. Featuring a new translation, an interview with author Mustapha Khayati, beautiful photographs and essays about the political relevance of the manifesto (then and now)—an edition like this has never before existed.

Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography (Harvard University Press)
Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis

Testosterone is a familiar villain, a ready culprit for everything from stock market crashes to the overrepresentation of men in prisons. But your testosterone level doesn't actually predict your appetite for risk, sex drive, or athletic prowess. It isn't the biological essence of manliness—in fact, it isn't even a male sex hormone. So what is it, and how did we come to endow it with such superhuman powers? T's story begins when scientists first went looking for the chemical essence of masculinity. Over time, it provided a handy rationale for countless behaviors—from the boorish to the enviable. Testosterone focuses on what T does in six domains: reproduction, aggression, risk-taking, power, sports, and parenting, addressing heated debates like whether high-testosterone athletes have a natural advantage as well as disagreements over what it means to be a man, woman, or otherwise.

The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (NYRB)
Elizabeth Hardwick, ed. Alex Andriesse

The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected Essays, a book that proved a revelation of what, for many, had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick was one of the great American literary critics, and an extraordinary stylist in her own right. The thirty-five pieces that Alex Andriesse has gathered here—none previously featured in volumes of Hardwick's work—make it clear that her powers extended far beyond literary criticism, encompassing a vast range of subjects, from New York City to Faye Dunaway, from Wagner's Parsifal to Leonardo da Vinci's inventions, and from the pleasures of summertime to grits soufflé. In these often surprising, always well-wrought essays, we see Hardwick's passion for people and places, her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write well about seemingly anything.

Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press)
Thomas Chen

The violent suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations is often thought to be contemporary China's most taboo subject. Yet despite sweeping censorship, Chinese culture continues to engage with the history, meaning, and memory of the Tiananmen movement. Made in Censorship examines the surprisingly rich corpus of Tiananmen literature and film produced in mainland China since 1989, both officially sanctioned and unauthorized, contending that censorship does not simply forbid—it also shapes what is created. Thomas Chen explores a wide range of works made despite and through censorship, including state propaganda, underground films, and controversial best-sellers, from print to the internet, TV to DVD, and fiction to documentary. A bold rethinking of contemporary Chinese literature and film, this book upends understandings of censorship, uncovering not just what it suppresses but also what it produces.