Front Table Newsletter 4/28

On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters
(Algonquin Books)
Bonnie Tsui

In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal narrative to examine not just what muscles are but what they mean to us. Cardiac, smooth, skeletal--these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty--and how they have distorted it--through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health.

I Am Clarence
(Random House)
Elaine Kraf

For Clarence's mother, life revolves around her young son; she takes him to see specialists to find the cause of his blindness and developmental delays, protects him from the cruelty of other children, and loves him tenderly. But she has her own struggles too. Her sanity is precarious and fractured, making caregiving increasingly difficult for her.

When her mental health reaches a breaking point, she checks herself into an institution so that she can get better and, she tells herself, be a better mother to Clarence. As she is forced to decide between his well-being and her own, the reader is faced with these essential questions: Can a mother's love for her child surmount her own emotional upheaval? How much can she sacrifice for her son and survive?


Democratic Theory of Truth
(University of Chicago Press)
Linda M. G. Zerilli

We say that we live in a "post-truth" era because disinformation threatens our confidence in the existence of a shared public world. Affirming objective truth may, therefore, seem necessary to save democracy. According to political theorist Linda M. G. Zerilli, such affirmation can stifle political debate and silence dissent. In fact, Zerilli argues that the unqualified insistence on objective truth is as dangerous for democracy as denying it.

Drawing on Arendt, Foucault, and Wittgenstein, A Democratic Theory of Truth challenges the concept of truth presupposed by the post-truth debate. It argues that we, the people, have an essential role in discovering and evaluating any truth relevant to the political realm. The result is a striking defense of plurality, dissent, and opinion in contemporary democratic societies.


Best Literary Translations 2025
(Deep Velum)
Cristina Rivera Garza (ed.)

Guest edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Cristina Rivera Garza, Best Literary Translations 2025 features poetry and prose originally written in nineteen languages, brought into English by some of the most talented translators working today.


Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change
(Harper Collins)
Angela Garbes

In Essential Labor, Garbes explores assumptions about care, work, and deservedness, offering a deeply personal and rigorously reported look at what mothering is, and can be. A first-generation Filipino-American, Garbes shares the perspective of her family's complicated relationship to care work, placing mothering in a global context--the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of color.

Garbes contends that while the labor of raising children is devalued in America, the act of mothering offers the radical potential to create a more equitable society. In Essential Labor, Garbes reframes the physically and mentally draining work of meeting a child's bodily and emotional needs as opportunities to find meaning, to nurture a deeper sense of self, pleasure, and belonging. This is highly skilled labor, work that impacts society at its most foundational level.


Ararat
(FSG)
Louise Gluck

Louise Glück, the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, was an era-defining poet, one who was innovative, brave, and wholly individual. 
Ararat, the great poet's sixth collection of poetry, was originally published in 1992. Now, in this new edition, the impact of the work is felt anew. Glück created a ruthlessly probing family portrait, and these poems confront, with devastating irony, the difficulties and intricacies of a daughter's relationship to her father and mother. The result is a "blinding and subtle" collection in which "the wonder comes silently, quick as an electric shock from a broken cord; we hardly know what's hit us."


As Gods Among Men
(Princeton University Press)
Guido Alfani

The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval thinkers feared that the super-rich would act 'as gods among men'; much more recently Thomas Piketty made wealth central to discussions of inequality. In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich and super-rich in the West, examining who they were, how they accumulated their wealth and what role they played in society. Covering the last thousand years, with frequent incursions into antiquity, and integrating recent research on economic inequality, Alfani finds--despite the different paths to wealth in different eras--fundamental continuities in the behavior of the rich and public attitudes towards wealth across Western history. His account offers a novel perspective on current debates about wealth and income disparity.