Front Table Newsletter 10/1
On this week’s Front Table, examine an ingenious transnational poetics of love and longing for the digital age while celebrating how poetry resonates across time and space; consider an on-the-ground account of the dramatic 2019 Hong Kong protests, showing how they represent the latest stage of a decades-old decolonization struggle; explore a rural narrative between two women in two different eras who both wanted to become farmers; enjoy a darkly funny novel about two sisters who are bound by an ancient secret; and ponder the profound relationship between mathematics and the arts. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.
Sister Snake : A Novel
(Ecco Press )
Amanda Lee Koe
Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim and using her charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret: once, they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang dynasty China.
Razor-sharp, hilarious, and raw in emotion, Sister Snake explores chosen family, queerness, passing, and the struggle against conformity. Reimagining the Chinese folktale "The Legend of the White Snake," this is a novel about being seen for who you are--and, ultimately, how to live free.
How to Cope : An Ancient Guide to Enduring Hardship
(Princeton University Press)
Boethius, Philip Freeman, trans.
What do you do when your life has fallen apart? Fifteen hundred years ago, a Roman nobleman named Boethius (ca. 480-524 CE) asked this question as he was sitting in a prison cell waiting to die, accused--probably unjustly--of treason. Boethius had been a rich and powerful man with all a person could want in life, but now he had lost everything. Shaken, he wondered how such terrible misfortune could have happened to him and why life was so unfair. When Philosophy herself appears in his cell and confronts Boethius, the conversation that follows between the two on the nature of evil and why humans suffer is as powerful and inspiring today as it was to its first readers. In How to Cope, Philip Freeman presents a lively modern translation of essential selections from Boethius's classic.
We Computers : A Ghazal Novel
(Yale University Press)
Hamid Ismailov
In the late 1980s, French poet and psychologist Jon-Perse finds himself in possession of one of the most promising inventions of the century: a computer. Enchanted by snippets of Persian poetry he learns from his Uzbek translation partner, Abdulhamid Ismail, Jon-Perse builds a computer program capable of both analyzing and generating literature. But beyond the text on his screen there are entire worlds--of history, philosophy, and maybe even of love--in the stories and people he and AI conjure.
Hamid Ismailov brings together his work as a poet, translator, and student of literature of both East and West to craft a postmodern ode to poetry across centuries and continents. Crossing the poètes maudits with beloved Sufi classics, blending absurdist dreams with the life of the famed Persian poet Hafez, moving from careful mathematical calculations to lyrical narratives, Ismailov invents an ingenious transnational poetics of love and longing for the digital age.
Grand Rapids
(Semiotext(e))
Natasha Stagg
Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder's public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001--the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.
Ghosts of the Farm : Two Women's Journeys Through Time, Land and Community
(Chelsea Green Publishing UK)
Nicola Chester
This is the story of Miss White, a woman who lived in the author's village 80 years ago, a pioneer who realised her ambition to become a farmer during the Second World War, and how she worked to become accepted within this community. Nicola Chester, too, dreamed of becoming a farmer but working with horses was the only path open to her. Was it easier for women to become farmers in the 1940s than it is now?
Moving between Nicola's own attempts to work outdoors and Miss White's desire to farm a generation earlier, Nicola explores the parallels between their lives - and the differences. Miss White buys a derelict farm and begins to renovate and modernize it. As ghost (barn) owls flit between these two worlds, Nicola draws connections with farming and rural life in both times, from the role of women in rural communities in the modern day to Miss White's experience in the 1940s. And how those farming modernizations have left the modern day with both a denuded landscape and farming community and a disconnect from nature.
Forever Hong Kong : A Global City's Decolonization Struggle
(Harvard University Press)
Ching Kwan Lee
Long known for its glamour and affluence, Hong Kong shocked the world in 2019 when millions of its citizens took to the streets in protest. For more than six months, Hong Kongers braved the police's often violent suppression. At the forefront were young adults fighting not just for universal suffrage but for their vision of a good society, a just economy, rule of law, and a future of self-determination.
Forever Hong Kong takes readers deep inside this improbable decolonization struggle in one of the global centers of capitalism, providing granular insight into a movement that had been gestating for decades. Caught between the relentlessly encroaching Chinese party-state and the kingpins of international commerce--for whom political complacency is the foundation of a stable and profitable business environment--are Hong Kongers themselves. They have inherited an island long under British and now Chinese rule, while maintaining a strong, distinct identity to be defended at all costs.
Blueprints : How Mathematics Shapes Creativity
(Basic Books)
Marcus du Sautoy
When Shakespeare has the Three Witches cast Macbeth's lot, he uses something very weird to do it: not simply "eye of newt and toe of frog," but the number seven. And when Hamlet claims, "To be or not to be, that is the question," Shakespeare reaches for eleven. For Shakespeare, prime numbers were magical. And he is not alone.
As Marcus du Sautoy showcases in Blueprints, creativity is inseparable from mathematics. The designs of Le Corbusier and Leonardo; the music of Glass, Bach, and Debussy; the wild visions of Dali, the choreography of Laban, the animation of Pixar--all are shot through with mathematics, from primes and fractals to the weirder worlds of Hamiltonian cycles and hyperbolic geometry. And Du Sautoy argues that the relationship runs both ways. Just as mathematics inspires new art, the artistic mindset is a necessity for discovering new mathematics.