Front Table Newsletter 4/14

The Sisterhood
(Columbia University Press)
Courtney Thorsson

One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves "The Sisterhood," the group would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation. The Sisterhood tells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American writing and cultural institutions. Drawing on original interviews with Sisterhood members as well as correspondence, meeting minutes, and readings of their works, Courtney Thorsson explores the group's everyday collaboration and profound legacy. 


The Night Trembles
(Seven Stories Press)
Nadia Terranova

Two stories converge in the aftermath of the devastating 1908 earthquake in Sicily and Calabria: a young woman sees a chance to avoid her impending arranged marriage and a boy manages to escape from the influence of an abusive mother on the verge of madness.


On Truth in Politics
(Princeton University Press)
Michael Patrick Lynch

Do any of us really care about truth when it comes to politics? Should we? In a world of big lies, denialism, and conspiracy theories, democracies are experiencing two interlocked crises: a loss of confidence in democracy itself and the growing sense among many that politics is only about power--not truth. In this book, Michael Patrick Lynch argues that truth not only can--but must--matter in politics. He shows why truth is an essential democratic value--a value we need to sustain our democratic way of life--and how it can be strengthened.


Siren of Atlantis
(Wave Books)
Cedar Sigo

Here are poems that speak to Sigo's profound experience of learning to write again after suffering a stroke in 2022. In creating this work, the author retraces poetic sources and reexamines style and tone, using a variety of compositional techniques to renegotiate what is at stake in the work. There is a joy in this collection, as Sigo allows us to bear witness to the rediscovery of language, imparting the work with a new and dramatic clarity, for the poet and ultimately for the reader as well.


Europe and the Wolf
(Zone Books)
Sara Nadal-Melsio

In this stunningly original book, Sara Nadal-Melsió explores how the work of several contemporary artists illuminates the current crisis of European universalist values amid the brutal realities of exclusion and policing of borders. The "wolf" is the name Baroque musicians gave to the dissonant sound produced in any attempt to temper and harmonize an instrument. Europe and the Wolf brings this musical figure to bear on contemporary aesthetic practices that respond to Europe's ongoing social and political contradictions.


Your Love is Not Good
(And Other Stories)
Johanna Hedva

At a party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the center of everyone's attention. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. 

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?


The Girl in the Middle
(Princeton University Press)
Martha A. Sandweiss

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government's treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. As The Girl in the Middle goes in search of her, it draws readers into the entangled lives of the photographer and his subjects.