Front Table Newsletter 1/21/26
On this week’s Front Table, be seduced and enlightened by a memoir in tales, place a new kind of value on nature, and dive into the joyous comics of Joe Brainard. Then, learn about the history, philosophy and radical call of maintenance, parse what's fact and fiction in the final work of a renowned novelist, rediscover a lost titan of Black fantasy, and introduce yourself to the lyricism and complexity of a major Mexican poet. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.
One Aladdin Two Lamps
(Grove Press)
Jeanette Winterson
A woman is filibustering for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to explore new and ancient questions. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy?
In her guise as Aladdin--the orphan who changes his world--Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know. To look again. Especially to look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realizes through the power of books that she can read herself as fiction as well as a fact: "I can change the story because I am the story."
An alluring blend of the ancient and the contemporary, One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson's newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future--an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew.
On Natural Capital
(Mariner Books)
Partha Dasgupta
For just about everything of value in life, there is an economic model. If it matters to us, we have found a way to put a dollar amount on it--to quantify its importance in our lives and society. These models and metrics tell us that our economies are healthy because they are growing. And yet for as long as they have existed, our economic models have served us an incomplete picture; they fail to account for the fact that our growth is driven by a resource that we take for free and treat as infinite: nature. Indeed, for centuries we have been using nature as if it were limitless, but more than ever, we are recognizing that our demands on the natural world are unsustainable.
In On Natural Capital, award-winning Cambridge University economist Sir Partha Dasgupta lays out a seminal new approach to economics that asks, what if we were to put a value on nature just as we value everything else? Rooted in mankind's struggle against climate change, Dasgupta's approach examines the existential need to rethink our relationship to nature and see its preservation as an economic imperative. Challenging much of economic thought that has come before, Dasgupta presents an urgent call to transform the focus and structures of global economics with a profound new model--one so radical that only an economist of his stature could make the world take it seriously. On Natural Capital is a bold and groundbreaking book that could, truly, change everything.
The Complete C Comics
(New York Review of Books)
Joe Brainard
In the creative hotbed of 1960s New York, Joe Brainard was a whirlwind. He was a maker of paintings, assemblages, collages, book covers, poetry-reading flyers, and more. But some of his most exciting work was done with his friends. In 1964, the twenty-two-year-old Brainard turned his talents to rewiring the lowly comic book form into something new and surprising. He invited his friends Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, and others--all of them New York School poets--to collaborate with him on comics that they would write and he would draw.
The results were unlike any comics seen before. Previously available only on the rare-book market (at very high prices) but available here under one cover for the first time, the two issues of C Comics still feel as fresh as when the first page rolled off the mimeograph machine more than sixty years ago. Brainard's energetic line and joyful humor charge across every page, illustrating O'Hara's recasting of a cowboy as a mash-note-writing lover, Padgett's experiments with traditional cartoon sound effects (ROAR! GRRR! SKREE!), cameos by Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, and heaps of Dadaesque delights.
This edition includes a foreword from Padgett and an essay by comics historian Bill Kartalopolous, who details the creation (and creators) of C Comics. A masterpiece of collaboration and spontaneity, C Comics is a testament to the vastness of Brainard's creativity and his ability to push any artistic form in a new and powerful direction.
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
(Stripe Press)
Stewart Brand
Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It's what keeps life going. Yet it's also easy to shirk or defer--until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional.
The first in a multi-volume work, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One offers a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance. The book begins with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions: the Golden Globe around-the-world solo sailboat race of 1968. It goes on to explore the insights that can be gleaned from vehicle maintenance, from the zeal of motorcycle maintainers to the maintenance philosophies that fought for dominance of the auto industry to the state of electric vehicle manufacturing today, with absorbing detours into the evolution of precision in manufacturing, the enduring importance of manuals, sustainment in the military, and the never-ending battle against corrosion.
Maintenance: Of Everything is a wide-ranging and provocative call to expand what we mean by "maintenance"--not just the tiresome preventative tasks but the whole grand process of keeping a thing going. It invites us to understand not only the profound impact maintenance has on our daily lives but also why taking responsibility for maintaining something--whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our very planet--can be a radical act.
Departure(s)
(Knopf Publishing Group)
Julian Barnes
Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: "There will be a story--or a story within the story--but not just yet."
Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Barnes's reckoning with the blood disorder he has been living with since he was diagnosed in 2020, his long preoccupation with dying and grief, and his mordant sense of the indignities and lost opportunities we're prey to in love. The story he promises to deliver is a love story, that of two friends he met at university in the 1960s, that time of touted but rarely experienced sexual freedom. Julian played matchmaker to Stephen (tall, gangling, uncertain) and Jean (tart and attractive); as the third wheel he was deeply invested in the success of their love and insulted when they broke up. Time is swift, and forty years later, he tries again, watching as their rekindled affair produces joys, betrayals, and disappointments of a different order.
"Life and memory can be so . . . quixotic, don't you find?" Barnes uses both his novelistic memory and his (real?) personal diary entries to examine not just the quixotic relationship of Jean and Stephen but his writer's eye upon it, and how his efforts in their behalf add up in the end. Having promised them he'd never write about them, he breaks the promise to fulfill one, amply, to his readers, in this delightful and poignant novelist's game that only Julian Barnes knows how to play.
To Leave A Warrior Behind
(Stewart McClelland)
Jon Tattrie
He was the "Father of Sword and Soul"--a sub-genre in fantasy writing, built on Black heroes, steeped in African myth and history. He spun vast worlds and created characters that directly challenged totemic figures such as Tarzan and Conan the Barbarian. He rewrote what fantasy could look like. Yet, when he passed away in Nova Scotia in 2020, few knew the name Charles R. Saunders, his past accomplishments largely forgotten.
Jon Tattrie worked alongside Charles for two years at the Halifax Daily News. He knew him as an imposing figure, a skilful editor, and as an eccentric character, but he wasn't aware of Charles' secret life as a literary trailblazer. After hearing about his old colleague's death, Tattrie reaches out to various people in Charles' life, and begins his own journey, piecing together two parallel worlds: one of Charles' tumultuous beginnings as a Black man in America who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War; and the fantasy world of Imaro, the Black hero forced to fend for himself in search of his own life's purpose.
Part biography of a man adamant to change the way we look at fantasy, part preservation of the influential epic works that have become largely unknown, To Leave a Warrior Behind is Tattrie's memorial to a larger-than-life figure, an intimate goodbye to a friend, and a remembrance of a writer who should not be forgotten.
Even Time Bleeds
(Princeton University Press)
Jeannette Clariond; Forrest Gander (Trans.)
Even Time Bleeds is a revelatory selection of the work of Jeannette Clariond, a major contemporary Mexican poet known for her sensuous lyricism and philosophical gravity. Translated and introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander, this volume gathers poems from across Clariond's career and presents the English translations and the original Spanish texts on facing pages. Whether writing about science or Romanticism, childhood or the Chihuahua Desert, ancient Mexican myths or the pandemic of Mexican femicides, Clariond displays a complex self-consciousness that captures much about contemporary identity in Mexico and beyond. Born in 1949 into a Lebanese family that emigrated to Mexico, Clariond has spent much of her life traveling between Mexico, the United States, and Spain, and she writes about varieties of exile and the fearsome complexity of the US-Mexican border with rare insight. Even rarer: she gives voice to her own interiority in a way that is accessible and piercing, as though her true country is inside of each reader.