Front Table Newsletter 12/16/2024

On this week’s Front Table, dive into the legacy of a legendary Hollywood director, and reflect on faith and despair in a poetic memoir. Discover a chilling dystopian world where elite students face tough choices, learn about the lasting trauma of Japanese American incarceration, and enjoy vibrant new African poetry. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com. 

George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director 
(Columbia University Press)
Joseph McBride

George Cukor, director of classic films like The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, and My Fair Lady, was often labeled as a "woman's director" due to his sexuality, but his work spanned a wide range of actors and genres. In this critical study, Joseph McBride examines Cukor's exceptional ability to elicit deeply emotional performances, highlighting his wit, psychological insight, and subtle emotional depth. Cukor's style, marked by his charm, irony, and resilience, allowed him to remain a prominent figure in Hollywood for over five decades. George Cukor's People provides a comprehensive look at his influential and multifaceted career.


Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair 
(Picador)
Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone blends poetry, criticism, theology, and memoir, exploring profound questions about faith, morality, and God with urgency and eloquence. Through fifty brief pieces, Wiman confronts despair, drawing on the works of writers like Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, and Emily Dickinson, while reflecting on his own life, including his family and childhood in West Texas. His thought-provoking and contemporary approach resonates with the timeless wisdom of great mystics, making Zero at the Bone a powerful and revealing work.

Shock Induction 
(Simon & Schuster)
Chuck Palahniuk

In Shock Induction, the top students at a prestigious high school are mysteriously disappearing, with each death ruled as a suicide. Beneath the surface, a darker truth emerges: these students have been monitored since birth by "Greener Pastures," an online service where billionaires track and recruit the brightest minds. Offered a lucrative but chilling choice—auctioning off their lives and labor for a fortune—students must decide whether to follow their dreams or secure a life of servitude to the world's elite. But how much choice do they really have?


The End of the World is a Cul De Sac
(Riverhead Books)
Louise Kennedy 

In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories by the author of the much-acclaimed Trespasses, women's lives are etched by poverty--material, emotional, sexual--but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they've been dealt.

A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate, with blood on her hands. An expectant mother's worst fears about her husband's entanglement with a teenage girl are confirmed. A sister is tormented by visions of the man her brother murdered during the Troubles. A woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Plumbing the depths of intimacy, violence, and redemption, these stories are "dazzling, heartbreaking . . . keen to share the lessons of a lifetime" (Guardian).

The Afterlife is Letting Go 
(City Lights Publishers)
Brandon Shimoda

In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the "afterlife" of the U.S. government's forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing. Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.

KUMI: New-Generation African Poets 
(Akashic Books, Ltd.)
Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, ed.

The New-Generation African Poets showcases the vibrant voices of emerging African poets. This annual series aims to introduce fresh, distinctive perspectives from across the African continent and its diaspora, highlighting the diverse and evolving landscape of contemporary African poetry. The poets included in this collection are Nurain Ọládèjì, Sarpong Osei Asamoah, Claudia Owusu, Nome Emeka Patrick, Qhali, Connor Cogill, Feranmi Ariyo, Dare Tunmise, and Adams Adeosun. Their works, accompanied by Victor Ehikhamenor’s striking artwork, offer readers a powerful mix of themes, from identity and belonging to the complexities of culture and heritage. New-Generation African Poets is not only a vital literary project but also a window into the future of African poetry, with each chapbook deserving of recognition for its unique contribution to the literary world.

Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery 
(University of Chicago Press)
Seth Rockman

In Plantation Goods, historian Seth Rockman challenges the conventional divide between the industrial North and agricultural South, revealing how slavery shaped the entire U.S. economy before the Civil War. By tracing everyday objects—such as shoes, tools, and clothing—produced in the North for use on Southern plantations, Rockman uncovers the interconnectedness of these regions. He shows how Northern industries outsourced supplies to the South while benefiting from the labor of enslaved people, creating a national economy rooted in slavery. Through compelling storytelling, Rockman explores how slavery and capitalism intersected, shaping both the lives of individuals and the broader American economy.