Front Table Newsletter 12/30/2024

What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt
(Liveright)
Hannah Arendt; Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill, trans.

Hannah Arendt, a renowned twentieth-century intellectual, was also a private poet. Between 1923 and 1961, she wrote seventy-four poems that offer glimpses into her personal reflections on love, loss, and existence. These poems remained hidden until rediscovered in 2011 by scholar Samantha Rose Hill. Now presented in English, this collection spans from the Weimar Republic to the Cold War, revealing Arendt's inner world and her responses to historical upheavals. With themes of transience, memory, and identity, these poems provide a unique insight into the mind of one of the most original thinkers of her time.


How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South
(Convergent Books)
Esau McCaulley

In How Far to the Promised Land, Esau McCaulley reflects on his life as a Black man who overcame poverty, racism, and an absent father to become a university professor. When his father unexpectedly dies, McCaulley is forced to reevaluate his personal narrative of exceptionality. As he traces his family's history, including the struggles of his great-grandmother in Jim Crow Alabama and his mother’s perseverance as a single parent, he challenges the simplistic narratives of poverty and upward mobility. This profound and compassionate book explores what it means to be human and the debts we owe to each other in the face of systemic injustice.


The Rest Is Silence
(NYRB Classics)
Augusto Monterroso; Aaron Kerner, trans.

The Rest Is Silence is the only novel by renowned Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, offering a humorous and surreal portrait of Eduardo Torres, a vain provincial Mexican literary critic. Presented as a festschrift, the book features unreliable reminiscences from Torres’s friends, family, and servants, alongside his own misguided critical efforts. A sharp satire of literary self-importance, Monterroso’s work skewers both the Mexican literary scene and the art of criticism itself, delivering a witty commentary on vanity and the absurdity of interpretation.


How to Fuck Like a Girl: Essays
(DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e))
Vera Blossom

A bold and vulnerable collection from a new, young voice, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a daring mash-up of pillow book, grimoire, and manifesto by writer Vera Blossom. From hooking up to trans witchcraft, petty crime, capitalism, friendships, divorce, and survival, Blossom brings wit and melancholy, grandeur and smarts, debuting a bright literary voice as raunchy as it is heartfelt. A cheeky how-to guide that earnestly asks if it is possible to fuck oneself into girlhood, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a cult classic in the making.


New York Sketches
(McNally Editions)
E.B. White

Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. In New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behavior of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorker--native, adoptive, or far from home--and a perfect introduction, not only to what White called "the inscrutable and lovely town," but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.
 

No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems, 2014-2024
(Yale University Press)
Najwan Darwish; Kareem James Abu-Zeid, trans.

No One Will Know You Tomorrow is a definitive collection of poetry by Najwan Darwish, one of the most important poets of the Arabic-speaking world. Drawing from five previous volumes and new unpublished work, this collection reflects Darwish’s urgent response to the trauma of war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and life in an occupied land. With spare, lyrical verse, he explores themes of loss, beauty, and spiritual longing, while connecting the experiences of Palestine to the broader history and culture of the Arabic-speaking world. His poetry serves as a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of tragedy.

Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (Revised)
(Bloomsbury Academic)
Henry A. Giroux
 
First published in 1988, Teachers as Intellectuals encourages us to see schools as democratic spaces in which teachers and students work together to transform society. Giroux incorporates the most valuable insights of critical pedagogy into a more comprehensive and practical theory of schooling, committed to educating students in the language of critique and possibility. At the heart of his vision for schooling is the ability of the teacher to act as a transformative intellectual and to use critical pedagogy as a form of cultural politics. The book includes an introduction by Paulo Freire, a foreword by Peter McLaren and new introduction from the author.