Front Table Newsletter 12/02

On this week’s Front Table, take a look into how structural racism is changing the streets of Detroit, then enter a haunting Kurdish novel where memory and revolution blur. Travel through a global history of the Seven Years’ War and step into a striking collection of strangely magnetic short stories. Follow a sweeping journey through the trees that shaped America, question the nature of identity in a classic tale of self-doubt, and dig into bold, incisive writing on a film industry in turmoil. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures (1st Edition)
(Stanford University Press)
Nicholas L. Caverly

For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Demolishing Detroit grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures.

 
Birds in a Gale: A Novel
(Common Notions)
Ata Nahai; Chiya Parvizpur and Hourieh Maleki Qouzloo (trans.)

Some years after the overthrow of the Shah, Mehraban has returned to Iran after a period of wandering and exile to write the story of a famed Kurdish revolutionary named Farhad. Guided by our unnamed narrator, Mehraban pursues his story and its mysterious living-dead subject, learning that he and Farhad share bittersweet memories of lost love amid fractured historical nightmares. Trapped in consciousness, trapped by mortality, trapped in a world that is not and cannot be comprehended, Birds in a Gale turns in on itself, entangling Mehraban's and Farhad's once-separate identities irrevocably before rejecting the objective altogether. Birds in a Gale is a poignant, psychological, and deeply political effort by one of Kurdistan's best-loved writers to restore the Kurds to their rightful place in the history of the revolution.

The World in Flames: A Global History of the Seven Years' War
(Columbia University Press)
Marian Füssel; Brían Hanrahan (trans.)

In the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), two European rivalries--between England and France and between Prussia and Austria--collided to spark a global conflagration. From Europe to the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, people across continents were swept up in clashes that began in faraway places and spread like wildfire. The World in Flames is a bottom-up history of the Seven Years' War, exploring this epochal conflict from the perspective of contemporaries around the globe. Drawing on hundreds of eyewitness accounts, Marian Füssel offers a sweeping portrait of warfare and everyday life during the cataclysm. He vividly narrates battles and sieges from the viewpoints of bakers, generals, and everyone in between. At once a media war and an economic war for commodities such as sugar and fur, a war of emerging nationalism and a last religious war, the Seven Years' War was a laboratory of modernity, combining the old world and the new. A groundbreaking, world-spanning microhistory, this book shows us the first truly global military conflict in a new light.

The Pelican Child: Stories
(Knopf)
Joy Williams

The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other--the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words--for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in "After the Haiku Period," who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds; in "Nettle," a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the "pelican child" who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience, possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.


Evergreen: The Trees That Shaped America
(Algonquin Books)
Trent Preszler

In Evergreen, Cornell University professor Trent Preszler takes us on a riveting journey through history, culture, and science, exploring America's story through the lives of its most resilient and cherished trees. Every December, homes, offices, and town squares around the world are adorned with lavishly decorated evergreens to ring in the holiday season. From the annual hunt for the perfect Rockefeller Center spruce, back to the earliest days when Ancestral Puebloan builders crafted remarkable dwellings from pine beams, Evergreen reveals surprising connections between past and present that fueled America's rise to global prominence. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Preszler captures the enduring struggle between nature's grandeur and humanity's desire to control and consume it. At once expansive and intimate, Evergreen delivers a stirring reflection on what it means to live in a world where Christmas trees stand as silent witnesses to our restless ambition, challenging us to reconsider the delicate balance between commercial excess and our profound yearning for hope and immortality.

One, None, and a Hundred Grand
(Archipelago)
Luigi Pirandello; Sean Wilsey (trans.)

When Vitangelo Moscarda's wife tells him his nose leans slightly to the right, his entire world swings off kilter. Loafing about, suddenly estranged from himself, he accosts friends, strangers, and passersby to look closely and confirm: Am I not the self I thought I was? Wandering from mirror to mirror, Moscarda embarks on a dizzying pursuit to see himself as others see him, to root out the stranger within. Searching endlessly for his true self, Moscarda ricochets through insecurity, reclusiveness, self-detachment, and doubt -- resolving, with icy recognition, that "people roll through their lives like stones, complacent, insensate, and closed," locked in an unknown face. Things quickly escalate from pensive reflection to dramatic confrontations as the protagonist disintegrates. With sharp dialogue and comic brilliance, Pirandello dissolves the fixity of perception, challenging us to question the solidity of our own identities and to consider the ways we are each held captive by the gazes of others.


Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025
(n+1)
A. S. Hamrah

A. S. Hamrah returns with an extraordinary collection of his best film writing for n+1, The Baffler, The New York Review of Books, the Criterion Collection, and other publications. Algorithm of the Night assembles Hamrah's essays on films and filmmakers and his inimitable, aphoristic reviews--a body of work that, taken together, presents a powerful alternative to a culture mired in publicity and stale convention. A journey through the overlapping dystopias of the Trump years, the Covid years, and the Trump years, Algorithm of the Night attends with remarkable style and precision to a film industry in self-imposed crisis, a chronicle of failures and occasional miracles from AI to The Zone of Interest. Against the tides of ignorance and solipsism, Algorithm of the Night is film criticism as literature and--perhaps--prophecy.