Front Table Newlsetter 11/17/23

On This Week's Front Table, interact with stories that explore conflicting boundaries from a collection of ghost stories that challenge the difference between the living and the dead, a pictorial essay that depicts ones relationship to the senses from an art critic who loses and gains their eyesight, an exploration of language that is shared and individualized through a set of twins that shifts between prose and poetry, and the curious backstory and duality of the people behind the creation of the dictionary, and how words and language are shaped by the people who produce it. Explore these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Nightside of the River 
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
Jeanette Winterson 

In this delightfully chilling collection, the iconic Jeanette Winterson turns her fearless gaze to the realm of ghosts, interspersing her own encounters with the supernatural alongside hair-raising fictions. Lifting the veil between the living and the dead, Winterson spirits us away to a haunted estate that ensnares a nomadic young couple in its own dark past, a staged immersive ghost tour gone awry, a West Village séance that threatens the bounds between AI and reality, and a vacation home in the metaverse where a widow visits an improved version of her deceased husband. Gloriously gothic and unnervingly contemporary, Winterson examines grief, revenge, and the myriad ways in which technology can disrupt the boundary between life and death.

Tone
(Columbia University Press)
Sofia Samatar 

Tone begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience rather than a single author, and should be approached through a communal practice. Tone  explores the atmospheres emanating from texts by Nella Larsen, W. G. Sebald, Heike Geissler, Hiroko Oyamada, Mieko Kanai, Bhanu Kapil, Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman, and others. This study treats a variety of questions: How is tone filtered through translation? Can a text hold the feelings that pass between humans and animals? What can attention to literary tone reveal about shared spaces such as factories, universities, and streets and the clashes and connections that happen there? Searching and conversational, Tone seeks immersion in literary affect to convey the experience of reading--and living--together.

Marigold and Rose
(Picardor USA) 
Louis Gluck 

Marigold and Rose is Louise Glück's astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography.Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. "Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow." Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything Glück has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent.

Cataract
(Notting Hill Editions) 
John Berger

The great art critic and writer John Berger joined forces again with Turkish writer and illustrator Selçuk Demirel in this unexpected pictorial essay. What happens when an art critic loses some of his sight to cataracts? What wonders are glimpsed once vision is restored? John Berger records the effects of cataract removal operations on each of his eyes. The result is an illuminated take on perception. Berger ponders how we can become accustomed to a loss of sense until a dulled world becomes the norm, and describes the sudden richness of reawakened sight with acute attention to sensory detail. This wise little book beckons us to pay close attention to our own senses and wonder at their significance as we follow Berger's journey into a more vivid, differentiated way of seeing. Demirel's witty illustrations complement the text, creating a mini-world where eyes take on whimsical lives of their own. The result is a collaborative collectors' piece perfect for every reader's bedside table.

Art Monsters
(Strauss and Giroux Farrar) 
Lauren Elkin 

What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty. In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkine explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies? Encompassing with a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference-- among them Julia Margaret Cameron's photography, Kara Walker's silhouettes, Vanessa Bell's portraits, Eva Hesse's rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann's body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's trilingual masterpiece DICTEE--and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, and Maggie Nelson. An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine--and enact--our lives.

Let's Become Fungal!
(Valiz) 
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez

The enormous popular interest in the world of fungi and the mycelium testifies to its tremendous resonance as a metaphor for new ways of thinking, new systems and behaviors. Taking its inspiration from this world, Let's Become Fungal! looks at a range of Indigenous practices from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia that are rooted in multispecies collaboration, symbiosis, alliances, non-monetary resource exchange, decentralization, bottom-up methods and mutual dependency--all suggestive of the behavior of the mycelium. Each of the book's 12 chapters offers teachings on collaboration, decoloniality, nonlinearity, toxicity, mobilization, biomimicry, death and being nonbinary, while also examining the world of fungi. Let's Become Fungal! shows how fungi can inspire artists, collectives, organizations, educators, policymakers, designers, scientists, anthropologists, curators, urbanists, activists, gardeners, community leaders, farmers and others to become more fungal in their ways of working and being. 

The Dictionary People
(Knopf Publishing Group) 
Sarah Ogilvie 

The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind's greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia . . . and thousands of others. Of deep transgenerational and broad appeal, a thrilling literary detective story that, for the first time, unravels the mystery of the endlessly fascinating contributors the world over who, for over seventy years, helped to codify the way we read and write and speak. It was the greatest crowdsourcing endeavor in human history, the Wikipedia of its time. The Dictionary People is a celebration of words, language, and people, whose eccentricities and obsessions, triumphs, and failures enriched the English language.