Front Table Newsletter 10/28/24

Haunted by insomnia and the past as he approaches his fiftieth birthday, the narrator of My Dead Book flips through scenes of his youth and memories of dozens of friends who are no longer with him. Living alone and working odd jobs in Wisconsin, he ruminates on survival, queer aging, his years as a teenage throwaway, and estrangement, wondering whether he has outlived his place in the world.

First published in 2021, Lippens’s debut novel was hailed as “a brutally acerbic novel of queer pessimism” (Donna Marcus, AnOther Magazine). As Lindsay Lerman observed in Southwest Review, “My Dead Book is not transgressive because it follows a gay man as he struggles to survive on the fringes of multiple worlds. … It is continually transgressing. It’s a living book (a living dead book), moving around in time, making tangential connections.”

This new edition includes an introduction by LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer, Eileen Myles.

Antarctica
(Grove Press)
Claire Keegan

First published in 1999 and proclaimed “an impressive debut” by William Trevor, Antarctica introduced the world to Claire Keegan, whose short fiction has since captured readers worldwide and established her as “among the form’s most masterful practitioners” (New York Times). Now with a revised titular story, this iridescent first collection of stories draws readers into a world of obsession and betrayal in Keegan’s singular, commanding and award-winning prose.

In “Antarctica,” a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with a man other than her husband. In “Love in the Tall Grass,” Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In “Passport Soup,” Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his young daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief. Keegan's writing contains a clear vision of unaffected truths and boldly explores a world where dreams, memory, and chance have crippling consequences for those involved. Often dark and enveloped in a palpable atmosphere, the reader feels that something momentous is lurking within each of these carefully sculpted tales.

The winner of the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Antarctica remains a dazzling and haunting debut by one of the world’s best short story writers.

Find Me as the Creature I Am
(Knopf)
Emily Jungmin Yoon

Find Me as the Creature I Am is a book full of tenderness and violence, longing and love. Ranging from inherited family tales to meditations on the body to animals’ display of love and grief alike, Emily Jungmin Yoon holds up a mirror to humanity to show that we are animal, too. In poems full of wonder and want, she showcases our tendencies to fight or fly, act with affection and cruelty, and ultimately, overflow with life itself.

“And when I say we are beasts, / is that a metaphor?” Yoon asks, exploring how we—like language, like any creature—stem from our surroundings. Braiding together reflections about the natural world, family heritage, and adoration, Yoon shows that what passes between us—body to body, generation to generation—is what defines a life. Deeply felt and beautifully crafted, Find Me as the Creature I Am is a rapturous collection by a rising star in the poetry landscape.

Cryptography
(The MIT Press)
Panos Louridas

We all keep secrets—from our gym locker codes to our email passwords to our online interactions. And we choose to share those secrets only with those whom we trust. So, too, do organizations, businesses, governments, and armies. In this fascinating book Cryptography, Panos Louridas provides a broad and accessible introduction to cryptography, the art and science of keeping and revealing secrets. Louridas explains just how cryptography works to keep our communications confidential, tracing it back all the way to its ancient roots. Then he follows its long and winding path to where we are today and reads the signs that point to where it may go tomorrow.

A few years back, interest in cryptography was restricted to specialists. Today, as we all live our lives attuned to our digital footprint and the privacy issues it entails, it becomes more and more essential to have a basic understanding of cryptography and its applications to everyday life. Starting with classical cryptography, Cryptography takes the reader all the way up to the twenty-first century cryptographic applications that underpin our lives in the digital realm. Along the way, Louridas also explains concepts such as symmetric cryptography, asymmetric cryptography, cryptographic protocols and applications, and finally, quantum and post-Quantum cryptography as well as the links between cryptography and computer security.

Explorers: A New History
(W. W. Norton & Company)
Matthew Lockwood

Unfurling a tapestry of surprising and historically overlooked figures spanning forty centuries and six continents, historian Matthew Lockwood narrates lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange. Familiar icons of exploration like Pocahontas, Columbus, Sacagawea, and Captain Cook find new company in the untold stories of people usually denied the title “explorers,” including immigrants, indigenous interpreters, local guides, and fugitive slaves. He highlights female voyagers like Gudrid Far-Traveler and Freydís Eiríksdóttir, Viking women who sailed to North America in 1000 AD, and Mary Wortley Montagu, whose pioneering travels to Constantinople would lead to the development of the world’s first smallpox vaccine. Figures like Ghulam Rassul Galwan, a guide for European travelers in the Himalayas, reveal the hidden labor, expertise, and local enthusiasm behind many grand stories of discovery. Other characters, like David Dorr, a man born into slavery in New Orleans who embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe and Egypt, embody discovery and wonder as universal parts of the human condition.

As Lockwood makes clear, people of every background imagine new worlds. Adventurers from every corner of the globe search for the unknown and try to understand it, remaking the world and themselves in the process. Exploration is for everyone who sets off into the unknown. It is the inheritance of all.

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
(Penguin Books)
Heather Cox Richardson

At a time when the very foundations of democracy seem under threat, the lessons of the past offer a roadmap for navigating a moment of political crisis. In Democracy Awakening, acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson delves into the tumultuous journey of American democracy, revealing how the roots of Donald Trump’s “authoritarian experiment” can be traced back through the earliest days of the republic. She examines the historical forces that have led to the current political climate, showing how modern conservatism has preyed upon a disaffected population, weaponizing language and promoting false history to consolidate power.

With remarkable clarity and the same accessible voice that brings millions of readers to her newsletter, Letters from an American, Richardson wrangles a chaotic news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to and what possible paths lie ahead. Her command of history and trademark plainspoken prose allow her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Nixon to the January 6 insurrection, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus, and the birth of “movement conservatism.”  

An essential read for anyone concerned about the state of America, Democracy Awakening is more than a history book; it’s a call to action. Richardson reminds us that democracy is not a static institution but a living, evolving process that requires constant vigilance and participation from all of us. This powerful testament to the resilience of democratic ideals shows how we, as a nation, can take the lessons of the past to address today’s challenges and secure a more just and equitable future.

What Comes After Farce?: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle
(Verso)
Hal Foster

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the Left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same?

What Comes After Farce? comments on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption.

A first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. A second group reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period. Finally, a third section surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction.

Among the phenomena explored here are "machine vision" (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface),"operational images" (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information so pervasive in our everyday lives.