Front Table Newsletter 12/30
On this week’s Front Table, travel Midwestern places shaped by memory and literature, follow a Korean teen with alexithymia as violence and friendship reshape his world, and confront hunger through a call for solidarity beyond food banks. Explore a Minnesota murder as a lens on class and unchosen lives, trace how rent and unearned income birthed modern capitalism, witness the brutal truths of French colonialism in Algeria, and uncover the gendered history of defamation law and women’s resistance. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.
Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest
(3 Fields Books)
Andy Oler (Ed.)
How do the stories we tell about Midwestern places influence or reflect our experiences? How is the literature of a place or a region relevant to the people who live there? In this expansive anthology, Andy Oler collects 72 original short essays by a diverse array of contemporary writers. Each explores locales in Midwestern literature relevant to the life and work of literary figures and canonical authors such as Toni Morrison and Willa Cather. Lingering in these places in both body and mind, the contributors contemplate the resonances and desires nurtured by their chosen location. Together, the essays take readers on an odyssey that maps our inner longing to connect across vast landscapes. A singular collection of creative nonfiction, Lingering Inland plumbs the personal and collective essence that binds Midwesterners together through words and places.
Almond (Nomad Edition): A Novel
(HarperVia)
Won-pyung Sohn; Sandy Joosun Lee (Trans.)
Yunjae was born with a brain condition called Alexithymia that makes it hard for him to feel emotions like fear or anger. He does not have friends--the two almond-shaped neurons located deep in his brain have seen to that--but his devoted mother and grandmother provide him with a safe and content life. Their little home above his mother's used bookstore is decorated with colorful Post-it notes that remind him when to smile, when to say "thank you," and when to laugh.
Then on Christmas Eve--Yunjae's sixteenth birthday--everything changes. A shocking act of random violence shatters his world, leaving him alone and on his own. Struggling to cope with his loss, Yunjae retreats into silent isolation, until troubled teenager Gon arrives at his school, and they develop a surprising bond.
As Yunjae begins to open his life to new people--including a girl at school--something slowly changes inside him. And when Gon suddenly finds his life at risk, Yunjae will have the chance to step outside of every comfort zone he has created to perhaps become the hero he never thought he would be.
Hunger Inc.: Building Solidarity Beyond the Food Bank (1st Edition)
(Pluto Press)
Kayleigh Garthwaite
Due to multiple political and economic crises, the demand for charitable food aid has increased enormously since 2020. Initially seen as an emergency measure, corporate-backed food aid programs are now entrenched 'solutions' to hunger. But who really benefits from them?
Kayleigh Garthwaite traveled across Britain, North America, and Europe, working with food banks, co-ops, urban farms, and food justice organizations. She documents the limitations of these programs and how institutionalizing charitable food aid absolves governments of their responsibility to ensure that people have a right to food.
As hunger and inequality continue to rise within advanced capitalist countries, this issue is more urgent than ever.
Hunger Inc. proposes radical key policies for government and explores alternative community-led responses grounded in solidarity, not charity, to end the need for food aid before the indignity of food banks becomes wholly normalized.
The Four Spent the Day Together
(Scribner)
Chris Kraus
On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, depressed town, on the fringes of the so-called "meth community," the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned.
At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they'd bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Locked into a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota--between the art world and the urban poverty of Paul's addiction therapist jobs, the rural poverty of the icy, depressed Iron Range--Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the brutality and despair surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers' lives, Catt is led back to the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.
Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the tensions of unclaimed futures and unchosen circumstances in the age of social media, paralyzing interconnectedness, and the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor.
Mother of Capital: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity (1st Edition)
(Pluto Press)
Matthew Costa
Rent, or unearned income, is a pervasive concept in contemporary economics. Economists of all stripes see today's global financial system as riddled with harmful rents. Still, most deny these are intrinsic to capitalism and insist they can be eliminated with the right policies. It begs the question, why is rent theory so critical of the present but so optimistic about the future?
In Mother of Capital, Matthew Costa delves into the intellectual and social history of charging for the use of property to solve this puzzle. Centering rent as the engine of capitalism's historical emergence in medieval Europe offers a groundbreaking, systematic history of the practice. The book also traces the history of resistance from below and unearths a neglected body of critical rent theory.
Weaving complex strands of social and intellectual history into a vivid, lively, and original explanation of how our society came to be, Costa boldly intervenes in contemporary debates about the origins and future of capitalism, the nature of social change, and history itself.
Attacking Earth and Sun: A Novel
(Other Press)
Mathieu Belezi; Lara Vergnaud (Trans.)
In search of a prosperous life, Séraphine and her family brave the dangerous journey to France's newly conquered Algerian territory, along with five hundred likeminded citizens. But the realities of the colony soon give the lie to the French government's promises: inadequate shelter, hostile weather, sickness, and a native population whose anger and desperation threaten to boil over into violence.
As the settlers gradually, painfully establish a community and a church in this foreign land, the French army wreaks devastation on the Algerian people and their villages. Through the eyes of a soldier--constantly reminded by his captain, "You're no angels!"--we witness their shocking cruelty as they attempt to quell resistance.
With chiseled, haunting prose reminiscent of Faulkner, Mathieu Belezi condenses years of historical research into a powerfully human account. Attacking Earth and Sun vividly exposes the hell that was colonization, far from the pioneer dream sold by Western powers.
Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law (1st Edition)
(Stanford University Press)
Jessica Lake
In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving "special damage." Smith should have lost her case, but her action set off a remarkable reform movement.
In Special Damage, Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called "whores." Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents.
The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal "civilised" New World.