Front Table Newsletter 2/11/26

On this week’s Front Table, encounter Toni Morrison as revelatory teacher, delve into the politics of art restitution, and read a fantastical novel about - well, art restitution, as well as Jewish history and what we owe to the dead. Then, follow the movements of the radical artists who redefined modern dance, get lost and found in the hybrid poetry of a Swedish polymath, enter the domestic sphere of Tudor and Renaissance magicians, and enjoy a novel of memory and justice that centers on a successful woman's fraught memories of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Language As Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon
(Knopf Publishing Group)
Toni Morrison

In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America's most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country's canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racial identity--these "Africanist" presences are "the shadow that makes light possible," as Morrison writes, and the reflections of their authors' own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.

With profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation's canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. "How," Morrison wonders, "could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands . . . of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with--without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants?"

To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most penetrating and subversive way yet. With a foreword by her son Ford Morrison and an introduction by her Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.

The Art of Status
(Oxford University Press)
Jelena Subotic

Why is art restitution a matter of politics? How does the artwork displayed in national museums reflect the international status of the state that owns it? Why do some states agree to return looted art and others resist?

National art collections have long been a way for states to compete with each other for status, prestige, and cultural worth in international society. In many former imperial nations, however, these collections include art looted during imperial expansions and colonial occupations. While this was once a sign of high international standing, the markers of such status, particularly in the context of art, have since significantly changed. A new international legal and normative architecture governing art provenance developed after World War II and became institutionalized in the 1990s and 2000s. Since then, there have been national and global social movements demanding the return of looted art. This shift has established not only that looting is wrong but, more importantly, that restitution is morally right. As a result of this reframing of what it means to own art, an artifact's historical provenance has become a core element of its value and the search for provenance and demands for restitution a direct threat to state status. The same objects that granted states high international status now threaten to provoke status decline.

In The Art of Status, Jelena Subotic examines this relationship between the restitution of looted art and international status, with a focus on the Parthenon ('Elgin') Marbles, the Benin Bronzes, and a collection of paintings looted during the Holocaust that are now housed at the Serbian National Museum. Subotic tells the story of these artworks, how they were looted, how they ended up on display in national museums, and how the art restitution disputes have unfolded. While these cases are different in terms of their historical context of looting and ownership claims, the movements for their restitution, and resistance to it, illustrate the larger questions of how national cultural heritage is internationally constructed and how it serves states' desire for international status and prestige.


The Tavern at the End of History
(Dzanc Books)
Morris Collins

Jacob, grandson of a Holocaust survivor, son of refugees, has lived his life overshadowed by the grief of others. His mistakes have cost him his job and his marriage. So when he meets Baer, an impoverished Holocaust survivor looking for help, Jacob sees an opportunity to redeem himself.

But what Baer wants won't be easy. A piece of art given to him as a boy--and that disappeared during the war--has resurfaced and is about to go up for auction in a secluded sanitarium for Holocaust survivors and their families on an island off the coast of Maine. The head of the sanitarium is Alex Baruch, a disgraced writer and Kabbalist whose memoir about surviving the Holocaust has been denounced as fraudulent. Baer asks Jacob to go to the auction with his niece, Rachel, and steal back the piece.

Rachel carries grief of her own. She's mourning her husband, a young Jew trying to separate himself from his ultra-orthodox community, and instead of living the artist's life she dreamed, she's working in a museum basement answering questions on the phone about paintings she can't see. Grieving and guilty, she's eager for an impossible quest.

Together, Rachel and Jacob head to the sanitarium, where they find Baruch and his community of odd and broken souls. But two nights before the auction, in the midst of a storm, a stranger appears--an old man, a ghost or a dybbuk, or just a survivor of the European catastrophe--bearing a secret. As the line between forgery and authenticity blurs, Rachel and Jacob, Baruch and his followers must face the claims the dead make on the living, in a surreal reckoning with the past where no one is who they say they are, but everyone may be telling the truth. Recalling the warmth and humor of Nicole Krauss and Joshua Cohen, and the wild collage of history and fantasy of Bruno Schulz and Olga Tokarczuk, The Tavern at the End of History is a deeply felt exploration of grief, love, and identity in the long shadow of twentieth-century calamity.

Wild Grace: The Untamed Women of Modern Dance
(Faber)
Sara Veale

In Wild Grace, Sara Veale profiles nine of the pioneering North American dancers at the heart of this movement. She shows how Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller fearlessly rejected nineteenth-century paternalism and how Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus battled to recenter marginalised histories with Dunham leading America's first major Black dance troupe and Primus breaking down doors as the first Black student at New York's New Dance Group.

Each of these dancers redefined the meaning of grace in their art and their lifestyle, conveying vital truths about what it means to walk the world as a woman. Veale brings to life the stories and artistry of these remarkable individuals and reveals how, in their refusal to conform, we can find urgent lessons for today.


blush / river / fox
(Milkweed Editions)
Anna Nygren

The startling English-language debut of Swedish polymath Anna Nygren is at once a domestic autistic ethnography, a more-than-human erotic pastoral, and an illustrated choreography of bewilderment. Willful misspellings and created constructions open language up to play, with phrases existing somewhere between English and Swedish to de-pathologize speech and thought. This fairy-tale treatise on otherness interweaves Nygren's own inimitable illustrations to visualize the idea that writing can be closer to a drawing of words than speaking. "We know yet nothing," they write. "We whisper it in the night / We are the pride glittering."

Sensory and sensual perception mesh through the liquid movement of the book's three parts as the speaker queers the notion of difference, exploring fraught ideas of gender and identity by tapping into the profane and the physical body. blush, hungry and dysphoric and tied inextricably to family memory, begins rooted in the corporeal before moving outside of it, calculating the speaker's orientation to others and to the world. fox, meeting love with violence, characterizes pain with short, dissonant syntax and finds reprieve in the cover of forest. And between forest and family is translation, river, which simultaneously stitches together and tears apart as it bears witness to the epistemology of becoming.

Wholly unique, a being all its own, blush / river / fox paws on the door of our eye, our heart, our ear: "LET ME IN / the Fox whispers."


The Years of the Wizard: The Strange History and Home Life of Renaissance Magicians
(September Publishing)
Rachel Morris

A lyrical and highly atmospheric exploration of the lives of Tudor and Renaissance magicians, men from Dee to Kepler to Bruno, who were also scientists, astrologers, mathematicians and alchemists. Their studies, books and ideas still permeate scientific history - as well as literature and film from Philip Pullman to CS Lewis, but what do we know of the rest of their households; the lovers, wives, mothers and daughters? In The Years of the Wizard, Rachel Morris also vividly reimagines the less documented lives of the magician's families and lovers. From those who supported the travelling households - packing up the libraries, feeding the assistants, entertaining the patrons, educating the children - as well as those archiving, documenting and collaborating with their magical work.

With vivid storytelling Rachel Morris magically animates both the known past lives of these extraordinary men and the imaginary stories of the less documented women, elders and children in this era of discovery and magic.

Casualties of Truth
(Grove Press)
Lauren Francis-Sharma

Prudence Wright seems to have it all: a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, D.C.; and the former glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her to dedicate her days to her autistic son, Roland. When she and Davis head out for dinner with one of Davis's new colleagues on a stormy summer evening filled with startling and unwelcome interruptions, Prudence has little reason to think that certain details of her history might arise sometime between cocktails and the appetizer course.

Yet when Davis's colleague turns out to be Matshediso, a man from Prudence's past, she is transported back to the formative months she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996. As an intern at a Johannesburg law firm, Prudence attended sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state, and which fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice. Prudence experienced personal horrors in South Africa as well, long hidden and now at risk of coming to light. When Matshediso finally reveals the real reason behind his sudden reappearance, he will force Prudence to examine her most deeply held beliefs and to excavate inner reserves of resilience and strength.

Lauren Francis-Sharma's previous two novels have established her as a deft chronicler of history and its intersections with flawed humans struggling to find peace in unjust circumstances. With keen insight and gripping tension, Casualties of Truth explosively mines questions of whether we are ever truly able to remove the stains of our past and how we may attempt to reconcile with unquestionable wrongs.