Front Table Newsletter 3/24

Luminous weeping speculative debut about three very unusual siblings, two human, one robot, living in a recently re-unified Korea, where sentient, very-nearly-human robots have fully integrated into society. Jun and Morgan Cho have barely spoken since the disappearance of their brother, Yoyo. But when Jun, a police officer, becomes embroiled in an investigation that reconnects him with Morgan, both are forced to confront deeper mysteries about their family, their lost brother, and humanity.

Abundance
(Avid Reader Press)
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic scarcity: from climate change to housing, education to healthcare. It explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear's villains. Rather, one generation's solutions have become the next generation's problems. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. In a book exploring how can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them. 
 

Malaparte: A Biography
(New York Review of Books)
Maurizio Serra

Curzio Suckert -best known by his pen-name Malaparte- was not only a literary master but one of the mystery men of twentieth-century letters. The son of a cosmopolitan German businessman, his mother an Italian, Malaparte led a life that was intimately entwined from start to finish with the twentieth century's troubled history, and only recently has it become possible to begin to separate fact from the screen of fictions with which he continually surrounded himself. A polymath and shapeshifter--fascist, communist, a converted Catholic on his deathbed--a self-mythologizer on the move between society salons, the corridors of power, and the frontlines, Malaparte is a complex and fascinating subject.


Invisible Cities
(Mariner Books Classics)
Italo Calvino

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo--Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: stories about memory and desire, art and creation, life and death. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor realizes these fantastic places are more familiar than they appear.

With a brilliant new introduction from Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr, and dreamlike illustrations of the cities interspersed throughout, this edition breathes new life into Calvino's classic, a celebration of the story's profound invention and enduring insight.


Kingdom of Play
(Scribner)
David Toomey

Acclaimed science writer David Toomey takes us on a fast-paced and entertaining tour of playful animals and the scientists who study them. From octopuses on Australia's Great Barrier Reef to meerkats in the Kalahari Desert to brown bears on Alaska's Aleutian Islands, we follow adventurous researchers as they design and conduct experiments seeking answers to new, intriguing questions: When did play first appear in animals? How does play develop the brain, and how did it evolve? Are the songs and aerial acrobatics of birds the beginning of avian culture? Is fairness in dog play the foundation of canine ethics? And does play direct and possibly accelerate evolution?


Mood Machine
(Atria/ One Signal)
Liz Pelley 

Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today's highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.

Building on her years of wide-ranging reporting on streaming, Pelly details the consequences of the Spotify model by examining both sides of what the company calls its two-sided marketplace: the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all. For all of the inequities exacerbated by streaming, Pelly also finds hope in chronicling the artist-led fight for better models, pointing toward what must be done collectively to revalue music and create sustainable systems. 


Wildcat Dome
(FSG)
Yuko Tsushima, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (trans.)

Mitch and Yonko haven't spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo--but ever since the sudden death of Mitch's brother, they've been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster.

Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they've kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it's all around them. Like history, it repeats itself.