Front Table Newsletter 11/25

On this week’s Front Table, read a collection of essays from a keen witness to American history, travel through climate-tinged stories spanning continents, and take up a bold feminist rethinking of art and power. Move through a life remembered by the seasons of a cherished home, and follow an investigation into survival and the stories we tell about trauma. Join a ferryman on his final passage through memory, then hear the voices of young people fighting for freedom across turbulent regions. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Languages of Home: Essays on Writing, Hoop, and American Lives 1975–2025
(Scribner)
John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman, acclaimed since the early 1970s for his award-winning fiction and memoirs, has long been engaged in a project to redefine, from the perspective of an American of color, the wondrous and appalling power of his country's literary culture and history. Now, curated by him, in this first-time collection from his extensive body of long-form journalism and biographical essays, readers are offered a chance to see and judge for themselves how Wideman has proven himself to be a luminous witness of America's history.

This volume goes beyond mere compilation; its challenging, insightful critical essays tell the story of a nation in transition--from the shame of legalized human slavery, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the rise of the Obama era, and beyond. Originally featured in publications such as Esquire, Vogue, and The New Yorker, these narratives explore the elusive cores of an American culture, politics, and identity. With his unique depictions of iconic figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Spike Lee, Emmett Till, and Michael Jordan, and intimate questioning of his own life, Wideman shares his original views of the changing tides of an American experience.

A Love Story from the End of the World: Stories
(Ecco)
Juhea Kim

Spanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilarious, and always heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of man-made apocalypse: in a near-future Seoul, where air pollution has become so fatal that the city has been encased in a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. A painter, disenchanted with New York City, travels to the South of France and falls into a dalliance with an entrepreneur who claims to have invented a new color. And on an island where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, upon which other countries have relegated their waste to form a mountain of landfill, a local boy facing daily privation gets internet famous for his K-pop-inspired dances.

Juhea Kim's first story collection views our broken world--and broken hearts--from breathtaking heights. A Love Story from the End of the World delivers an impassioned reminder that we are human--but without nature, we are nothing at all.
 

Feminism. Art. Capitalism. (1st Edition)
(Pluto Press)
Angela Dimitrakaki

Feminism. Art. Capitalism. calls for a revolutionary rethinking of the feminist struggle and its relation to art.

Championing Marxist feminism and focusing on the layers of capitalist hegemony, the book considers the exploitation of enthusiasm in art's promise of a self-determined subject, the ideological capture of feminism, modernity's attachment to technology (and its magic), the historical context and impact of postmodernism, and the question of class and social reproduction.

Provocative and uncompromising, Feminism. Art. Capitalism. offers an indispensable guide for art history, theory, and practice - inviting readers to confront what claiming art and feminism as sites of resistance actually entails.

Our Precious Wars
(Europa Editions)
Perrine Tripier; Alison Anderson (trans.)

What remains of the springs, summers, autumns, and winters of a woman's life?

Isadora, now an old woman relegated to a hospice, looks back on her life and how intimately intertwined it was with that of the big, sprawling house where she spent almost her entire existence. Her memories of childhood and beyond come back to her, season by season: from the games and warmth of Summer and the back-to-school days of Autumn, to the crisp, cold days of Winter--days of loneliness and death--and to Spring's promise of renewal, and of the return to the house that meant so much to her. Told in lyrical, beguiling language, Isadora guides the reader through the maze of her memory by classifying, like a watercolor painter, her recollections by season.


Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation
(Doubleday)
Jen Percy

After a childhood spent learning survival strategies in the wilderness, Jen Percy thought she knew how she would respond in the face of danger. But a series of unsettling interactions with men left her feeling betrayed and confounded by her body's passivity. Forced to reckon the myths of her own empowerment, Percy set off a broader inquiry into the way fear shapes behavior in the context of sexual violence, including the strange behaviors of three generations of women in her family.

Drawing on original reporting, years of conversations with survivors, and her own life story, Percy explores the surprising ways in which responses to sexual violence are shaped by both evolutionary instinct and gendered scripts. Girls Play Dead meaningfully expands the language available to survivors and complicates our expectations of how a trauma story should sound--especially when belief, justice, and healing are contingent on how well a story "makes sense." Percy examines how trauma corrupts storytelling itself, making survivors' accounts seem fractured or surreal--and therefore less credible to institutions demanding coherence--resulting in an ambitious testament to the mind as a record of resilience.

The Ferryman and His Wife: A Novel
(Algonquin Books)
Frode Grytten; Alison McCullough (trans.)

Nils Vik wakes up on November the 18th and knows it will be the day he dies. He follows his morning routine as voices from his past echo in his mind, and looks around the empty house one last time, before stepping onto his beloved boat. His dog, dead these many years, leaps aboard with him, and then the other dead begin to emerge - from the woods along the fjord, from each of the ferry stops along the route, from his logbook full of memories and quotations and jotted-down notes about the weather conditions. The people from the past accompany him now, prodding him, showing him what he might have missed before, as he waits for his Marta, his late, remarkable wife, to finally join him on the boat again.

The Ferryman and His Wife is the story of a quiet, yet utterly profound, life told in reverse. Timeless and absorbing, this is a novel about what we take with us - those moments that might seem insignificant as they happen but prove to be the most meaningful, in the end.


The Fire: Voices of a Generation in Iran, Ukraine, & Afghanistan
(Europa Editions)
Cecilia Sala; Oonagh Stransky (trans.)

In The Fire, acclaimed journalist Cecilia Sala takes readers on a gripping journey through some of the world's most volatile regions, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. Through the eyes of young people like Kateryna, a Ukrainian soldier; Assim, an Iranian student at the forefront of the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests; Nabila, a Muslim kickboxing champion and lesbian; and Zarifa, a political activist in Afghanistan, Sala offers an intimate portrayal of lives caught amidst turmoil and fighting for a better life.