Front Table Newsletter 4/21

Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages
(Princeton University Press)
Lorna Gibb

Languages and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the resulting loss of a rich linguistic tapestry reflecting unique perspectives and ways of life. Rare Tongues tells the stories of the world's rare and vanishing languages, revealing how each is a living testament to human resilience, adaptability, and the perennial quest for identity.

Taking readers on a captivating journey of discovery, Lorna Gibb explores the histories of languages under threat or already extinct as well as those in resurgence, shedding light on their origins, development, and distinctive voices. She travels the globe--from Australia and Finland to India, the Canary Islands, Namibia, Scotland, and Paraguay--showing how these languages are not mere words and syntax but keepers of diverse worldviews, sites of ethnic conflict, and a means for finding surprising commonalities. Readers learn the basics of how various language systems work--with vowels and consonants, whistles and clicks, tonal inflections, or hand signs--and how this kaleidoscope of self-expression carries vital information about our planet, indigenous cultures and tradition, and the history and evolution of humankind.

Rare Tongues is essential reading for anyone concerned about the preservation of endangered languages and an eloquent and disarmingly personal meditation on why the world's linguistic heritage is so fundamental to our shared experience--and why its loss should worry us all.


The Living Mountain
(Scribner)
Nan Shepherd

Now with a new introduction by Robert Macfarlane and a new afterword by Jenny Odell, this masterpiece of nature writing by Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into "the high and holy places" of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world of spectacular cliffs, deep silences, and lakes so clear that they cannot be imagined. As she walks through clouds, endures blizzards, and watches the great spirals of eagles in flight, Shepherd comes to know something about the hidden life of this remarkable landscape--and also herself.

The Living Mountain is the result of one woman's lifetime spent in search of the essential nature of the wild world around her. Composed during World War II, Shepherd's manuscript lay untouched for almost four decades, nearly lost to time, before it was finally published. In the decades since, audiences and critics of all generations have embraced it as a classic, an enduring testament to the magnificence of mountains and our communion with the environment.


Silver: Poems
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Rowan Ricardo Phillips

This beautiful, slender collection--small and weighted like a coin--is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. "Not the meaning," Phillips writes, "but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life" powers these poems as they conjure their prismatic array of characters, textures, and moods. As it reverberates through several styles (blank verse, elegy, terza rima, rhyme royal, translation, rap), Silver reimagines them with such extraordinary vision and alluring strangeness that they sound irrepressibly fresh and vibrant. From beginning to end, Silver is a collection that reflects Phillips's guiding principle--"part physics, part faith, part void"--that all is reflected in poetry and poetry is reflected in all.

This is work that brings into acute focus the singular and glorious power of poetry in our complex world.


Tom Torluemke: Live!
(Skira)
Tom Torluemke

Tom Torluemke's (born 1959) name is familiar to Chicago art lovers thanks to his detailed acrylic paintings observing society's ills with the doting attention of a diehard humanist. Live! highlights his understudied works on paper, capturing 40 years of Torluemke's freewheeling imagination and technical skill.


Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left
(The MIT Press)
Eric Heinze

Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its "wokeness."

In Coming Clean, Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke. In fact, we need more wokeness, but of a new kind. Yes, we must teach about these bleak pasts, but we must also educate the public about the left's own support for regimes that damaged and destroyed millions of lives for over a century--Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the Kim dynasty in North Korea.


Attila
(Open Letter)
Aliocha Coll; Katie Whittemore (trans.)

Attila the Hun, reimagined as a visionary leader, contemplates the fate of his people at the gates of Rome. His son, Quijote, is caught between empires and ideals, forced to choose between his father's vision of a Hunnic utopia and the decaying allure of Roman civilization. As Rome burns, Quijote journeys through both real and surreal landscapes, encountering psychedelic visions, mystical revelations, and existential dilemmas.

Quijote's journey blurs the lines between past and future, uniting Biblical, Classical, and Buddhist traditions while moving between planes of existence. Attila is an intricate and elusive masterpiece from the explosive and disorienting imagination of Aliocha Coll, where characters from myth and history intermingle in a stunning labyrinth of allegory and metaphor.


When the Harvest Comes: A Novel
(Random House)
Denne Michele Norris

The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man's name with tenderness.

But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, for a freer life in New York City, won't be there to walk him down the aisle. All Davis needs to be happy in this life is Everett, his new family, and his burgeoning career as an acclaimed violist.
When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has been in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotion resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, risking his fledgling marriage along the way.

In resplendent prose, Denne Michele Norris's When the Harvest Comes reveals the pain of inheritance and the heroic power of love, reminding us that, in the end, we are more than the men who came before us.