Front Table Newsletter 10/21

On this week’s Front Table, witness a decade of upheaval through a journalist’s sharp chronicle of protest, and step into the heart of Puerto Rico where a mother and daughter fight to rebuild what violence has torn apart. Visit 1970s Copenhagen through a child raised by seven feminist mothers, and join a defiant woman as she stages her own swayamvar to test the limits of love, age, and autonomy. Explore the digital frontier in a writer’s personal history of the Internet, drift through the dreamscapes of a poet reckoning with insomnia, and glimpse a near future where biotechnology, AI, and genetics converge to reshape the human story. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025
(One World)
Jelani Cobb

From the moment that Trayvon Martin's senseless murder initiated the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, America has been convulsed by new social movements--around guns, gender violence, sexual harrassment, race, policing, and on and on--and an equally powerful backlash that abetted the rise of the MAGA movement. In this punchy, powerful collection of dispatches Jelani Cobb pulls the signal from the noise of this chaotic era. Cobb's work as a reporter takes readers to the front lines of sometimes violent conflict, and he uses his gifts as a critic and historian to crack open the meaning of it all. Through a stunning mélange of narrative journalism, criticism, and penetrating profiles, Cobb's writing captures the crises, characters, movements, and art of an era--and helps readers understand what might be coming next.

This Is the Only Kingdom: A Novel
(Algonquin Books)
Jaquira Díaz

When Maricarmen meets Rey el Cantante, beloved small-time Robin Hood and local musician on the rise, she begins to envision a life beyond the tight-knit community of el Caserío, Puerto Rico - beyond cleaning houses, beyond waiting tables, beyond the constant tug of war between the street hustlers and los camarones. But breaking free proves more difficult than she imagined, and she soon finds herself struggling to make a home for herself, for Rey, his young brother Tito, and eventually, their daughter Nena. Until one fateful day changes everything. Fifteen years later, Maricarmen and Nena find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation as the community that once rallied to support Rey turns against them. Now Nena, a teenager haunted by loss and betrayal and exploring her sexual identity, must learn to fight for herself and her family in a world not always welcoming. This is the Only Kingdom is an immersive and moving portrait of a family - and a community - torn apart by generational grief, and a powerful love letter to mothers, daughters, and the barrios that make them.

My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women's Movement
(University of Minnesota Press)
Pernille Ipsen; Tiina Nunnally (Trans.)

On New Year's Eve in Copenhagen in 1972, seven women had a child together: one gave birth and six others attended. They had met a year earlier at a feminist women's camp on a small island and now, with about twenty other women's liberationists, they occupied three dilapidated apartment buildings in the center of Copenhagen. One became the country's first Women's House, the nerve center of the Women's Movement in Denmark, and the other two were women-only communal living spaces that were Pernille Ipsen's first home. In this intimate portrait of life during the exhilarating early days of women's liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the globe, she tells the stories of these seven women, her seven mothers. A chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived, My Seven Mothers is an eye-opening account of a time of fierce struggles over family, sexuality, and child-rearing, reminding us that new worlds are always possible.

Intemperance: A Novel
(HarperVia)
Sonora Jha

A woman who has left two husbands announces she will celebrate her 55th birthday by holding a swayamvar. Drawn from an ancient custom in her Indian culture, this is an event in which suitors line up to compete in a feat of wills and strength to win a beautiful princess's hand in marriage. The woman, a renowned and respected intellectual in an American town who has declared her "past such petty matters as love," knows she is now setting herself up for widespread societal ridicule. To her surprise, a cast of characters show up to support her call--a wedding planner looking for the next enchanting thing, a disability rights activist making a documentary film, and even, begrudgingly, her own young adult son. As her whole plan spirals into a spectacle, the woman embarks on a journey to decide what feat her suitor must perform to be worthy of her wrinkling hand. Intemperance is at once a satirical feminist folktale and a meditation on how we might reach past all sense and still find love.


Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet
(Roxane Gay Books)
Tochi Onyebuchi

When Tochi Onyebuchi realized that his acclaimed science fiction and fantasy storytelling career had been centrally preoccupied with race, it prompted him to consider his responsibilities as a Black writer in the Internet age. Tracing his online persona in reverse chronological order, Onyebuchi deftly examines the evolution of internet culture and the ways that culture has shifted in the ensuing decades. From the ever-changing nature of personal writing and free expression, to gaming, manga, fandom, and virtual reality, Onyebuchi examines if our vision for what is possible has really broadened or if the Internet has only amplified our failures of imagination. Excavating the Internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Racebook explores how the writer and public intellectual Onyebuchi is today was formed in that crucible, and calls for a liberation of the individual behind the code.


I Love Hearing Your Dreams: Poems
(Scribner)
Matthew Zapruder

From a poet whose "poems don't merely attempt beauty; they attain it," an enchanting and harrowing journey through the landscape of dreams and twenty-first century hopes and disillusions."Your dreams / have no hidden / agenda to be wise / they are made / to be forgotten / so something / can be known." I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a book of reveries, of failed elegies, of "the last time that things were real" and the moments that come afterward. These are dream songs for an age of insomnia, where the poet is always awake "at that oddest hour / that does not end, / the crooked, unnumbered one" and the future seems to be "just the past in a suit / that will never be in style." Yet dreams in Matthew Zapruder's poems are also a place of possibility, of reality envisioned anew--sleep shows us not merely what the world is, but what it could be. 


Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform our Lives, Work, and World
(Timber Press)
Jamie Metzl

The story of AI is not just ChatGPT. It is how we can use the revolutionary suite of interconnected new technologies to improve our health, feed billions of people, supercharge our economies, store essential information for millions of years, and save our planet. But if we're not careful, these same Promethean abilities to engineer novel intelligence and reengineer life can also do immeasurable harm, warns leading futurist Jamie Metzl in this bold and inspiring exploration of transformative human knowledge. Revised and updated to include the most cutting edge innovations in healthcare, food, material science, and more, Superconvergence is the essential guide to building our best possible future.