Front Table Newsletter 1/13

On this week’s Front Table, explore the moral philosophy of procreation, read a lyrical memoir of unresolvable loss, and become immersed in a sweeping novel of contemporary Pakistan. Trace the history and revelations of seismic events, peruse four tales of evasion and mystery, explore the place of the deep in African American literature, and read a book-length poem divided into the grueling hours of a night shift on a factory floor. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?
(Princeton University Press)
Mara van der Lugt

"Do you want to have children?" is a question we routinely ask each other. But what does it mean to create a child? Is this decision always justified? Does anyone really have the moral right to create another person? In Begetting, Mara van der Lugt attempts to fill in the moral background of procreation. Drawing on both philosophy and popular culture, van der Lugt does not provide a definitive answer on the morality of having a child; instead, she helps us find the right questions to ask.

Most of the time, when we talk about whether to have children, what we are really talking about is whether we want to have children. Van der Lugt shows why this is not enough. To consider having children, she argues, is to interrogate our own responsibility and commitments, morally and philosophically and also personally. What does it mean to bring a new creature into the world, to decide to perform an act of creation? What does it mean to make the decision that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted? These questions are part of a conversation we should have started long ago. Van der Lugt does not ignore the problematic aspects of procreation--ethical, environmental and otherwise. But she also acknowledges the depth and complexity of the intensely human desire to have a child of our own blood and our own making.


Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies
(Assembly Press)
Dani Netherclift
In 1993, when she was eighteen years old, Dani Netherclift witnessed the drowning deaths of her father and brother in an irrigation channel in North East Victoria, Australia. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw her loved ones again. Netherclift hasn't stopped imagining the shape of this bodily loss. Not viewing the bodies grows into a form of ambiguous loss that makes the world dangerous, making people seem liable to suddenly vanishing.

What would it have been like to have seen them, after the fact? To have looked upon their bodies. To picture the emptied vessels of her father and brother is to reach toward a sense of closure, a form of magical thinking in which goodbye is made possible. Vessel pulls together a language of space and ruin, building toward the realization that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests--elegies--inked on the skins of the dead.


This Is Where the Serpent Lives
(Knopf Publishing Group)
Daniyal Mueenuddin

Moving from Pakistan's dazzling chaotic cities to its lawless feudal countryside, This Is Where the Serpent Lives powerfully evokes contemporary feudal Pakistan, following the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters whose lives are linked through violence and tragedy, triumph, and love. Orphaned as a little boy and fending for himself in the city streets, Yazid rises to a place of responsibility and respect in the Lahore household of Colonel Atar, a powerful industrialist and politician, only to find that position threatened by conflicting loyalties and misplaced trust. Born on Colonel Atar's country estate to a poor gardener, Saqib is entrusted with the management of a pioneering business, but he overreaches and finds himself an outlaw, confronting the violence of the corrupt Punjab Police. The colonel's son competes with his cherished brother for the love of a woman and discovers that her choice colors his life with unexpected darkness as well as light.

In matters of power and money and the heart, Mueenuddin's characters struggle to choose between paths that are moral and just and more worldly choices that allow them to survive in the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their culture. Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.

When Worlds Quake: The Quest to Understand the Interior of Earth and Beyond
(Princeton University Press)
Hrvoje Tkalčic

When Worlds Quake is a fascinating account of how scientists around the globe seek to use quakes to answer tantalizing questions about the structure and inner dynamics of our planet and to discover the deepest secrets of our nearest neighbors in the solar system.

Briefly traversing the history of seismology, Hrvoje Tkalčic describes the women and men who sought to understand major seismic events--from the catastrophic 1556 Shaanxi earthquake and the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 to more recent events such as the 2020 earthquakes in Tkalčic's native Croatia--and thus shaped the field. Modern global seismologists now not only study the behavior of earthquakes but also use seismic waves as tools to image Earth's deep interior. To do this work, they need seismographs positioned around the globe, including in remote, challenging regions. Tkalčic takes the reader along on his own daring expeditions to install seismographs and collect seismic wave data from the wilds of the Australian Outback to the rough depths of the Southern Ocean, and even farther afield--to the Moon and Mars, where quakes can be used to image the interiors of these worlds.

A riveting and often personal narrative about the cutting-edge science of global and planetary seismology, When Worlds Quake reveals how quakes can help scientists to understand the mysterious inner architecture and ongoing evolution of our planet, as well as worlds beyond our own.


As If By Magic
(Bellevue Literary Press)
Edgar Telles Ribeiro; Kim M. Hastings and Margaret A. Neves (Trans.)

Nothing is as it seems in the sinuous tales of Brazilian master Edgard Telles Ribeiro. A son embarks on a journey involving a disappearing suitcase, secret police, and a strange letter, while pursuing a father who appears to have fallen victim to Alzheimer's disease. A man inherits a deserted island and is drawn into the mysterious, possibly deadly affairs of a strange couple on a sailboat. A gold miner in a remote Amazon outpost escapes from a murderous foreman by building an improbable machine. A writer chases the evasive opening sentence of his novel while locked down in his Rio de Janeiro apartment with his wife, until she usurps the narrative.

In the four tales that comprise As If by Magic, Edgard Telles Ribeiro invites us into labyrinthine worlds where what we perceive is only the beginning of the story.


Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness
(Duke University Press)
Jonathan Howard

In Inhabitants of the Deep, Jonathan Howard undertakes a black ecocritical study of the deep in African American literature. Howard contends that the deep--a geographic formation that includes oceans, rivers, lakes, and the notion of depth itself--provides the diffuse subtext of black literary and expressive culture. He draws on texts by authors ranging from Olaudah Equiano and Herman Melville to Otis Redding and August Wilson to present a vision of blackness as an ongoing inhabitation of the deep that originates with and persists beyond Middle Passage. From captive Africans' first tentative encounter with the landless realm of the Atlantic to the ground on which black peoples still struggle to stand, the deep is what blackness has known throughout the changing same of black life and death. Yet this radical exclusion from the superficial Western world, Howard contends, is more fully apprehended not as the social death hailed by the slave ship but as the black ecological life hailed by a blue planet.

plastic
(Soft Skull)
Matthew Rice

Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis, and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rice's experience working in a plastic molding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labor in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a "post-industrial," "post-Troubles" society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film, and the visual arts.

Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker's experience, Rice meditates on masculinity, sectarianism, and intergenerational trauma. But at its core is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labor--making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day.

Invoking the brevity of Seamus Heaney, plastic is an expansive and imaginative poem that offers the working class a grace, dignity, and truth not often found in contemporary literature.