Front Table Newsletter 5/19

On this week’s Front Table, enter a story of art, obsession, and mind-sharing technology; follow a Harvard senior as she teeters between reinvention and collapse in a country that offers her no legal future; and witness a therapist’s deep dive into the misunderstood world of borderline personality disorder. Trace the hidden roots of American capitalism through the rise of multilevel marketing, reflect on ancient philosophies for surviving ecological catastrophe, and descend into Earth’s crust to meet the alien microbes thriving in its most extreme depths. Finally, lose yourself in a haunting, hallucinatory tale of desire and devastation as a frozen apocalypse inches ever closer.

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Immaculate Conception
(Dutton)
Ling Ling Huang

Enka meets Mathilde in art school and is instantly drawn to her. Mathilde makes art that feels truly original, and Enka—trying hard to prove herself in this fiercely competitive world—pours everything into their friendship. But when Mathilde’s fame and success cause her to drift away, Enka becomes desperate to keep her close. Enter SCAFFOLD: a cutting-edge technology that claims to enhance empathy by allowing Enka to inhabit Mathilde’s mind and access her memories, artistic inspirations, and trauma. Undergoing this procedure would link them forever—but at what cost?

Following Nature's Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World
(Princeton University Press)
M.D. Usher

How should we think and live in a world facing environmental catastrophe? In this urgent and wide-ranging book, classicist and farmer M.D. Usher brings together ancient, indigenous, and modern ideas about reconnecting with Nature to heal our damaged planet and lives. The ancients hewed close to Nature, their source of survival, in ways we can scarcely imagine, and ancient philosophy often insists we follow Nature’s lead. Usher argues that Nature’s resilience can guide our responses to climate trauma and the harms of modern life. Plato meets Jakob von Uexküll, Lucretius illuminates King Lear, and Diogenes crosses swords with Thoreau. Drawing on philosophy, science, economics, art, literature, history, and religion, Following Nature’s Lead shows why learning to live with Nature is essential for our survival.

Borderline: A Biography of a Personality Disorder
(Beacon Press)
Alexander Kriss

Mental illness is heavily stigmatized, and within this already marginalized group, those with BPD are seen as especially untreatable. When Alex Kriss began training as a therapist, his supervisors warned him that borderline patients were manipulative, difficult, and likely to drop out of treatment. Years later, when a borderline patient named Ana came to his private practice, he felt compelled to help her despite those warnings. Borderline is the story of his work with Ana—how his successes with her led him to welcome other BPD patients and advocate for them. It is also the story of the disorder itself, tracing its history from early psychiatry to the development of the modern diagnosis and today’s evolving attitudes toward treatment.


Catalina
(One World)
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like destiny fulfilled: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, grows up in Queens with undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own probing, contradictory mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world with no place for the undocumented, and her sense of doom intensifies her desires. She infiltrates elite subcultures—internships, literary journals, secret societies—which she observes like an anthropologist, both fascinated and repulsed. Longing for a great romance, she is drawn to a fellow student, an aspiring anthropologist eager to explain the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life in Queens begins to unravel. The clock ticks toward the abyss of post-college life. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved? Part campus novel, part hagiography, part pop song, Catalina is a daring and unforgettable coming-of-age story.


Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America
(Crown)
Bridget Read

Companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife promise the world’s greatest opportunity: to be your own boss through multilevel marketing (MLM), a business model built on expensive products and aggressive recruitment. Despite overwhelming evidence that most people lose money—and that many MLMs are pyramid schemes—the industry’s ties to right-wing figures like Ronald Reagan have helped it avoid scrutiny. From postwar California to the religious suburbs of Michigan to massive sales conventions, Little Bosses Everywhere traces the rise of MLM as a stealth force in American capitalism. Journalist Bridget Read reveals how MLM preys on economic crises and targets the most vulnerable—laid-off workers, mothers, teachers—while enriching elites like the DeVos family, Warren Buffett, and Donald Trump. Through vivid reporting and personal stories, Read exposes MLM as a cunning grift that has shaped how we live and threatens the very foundations of democracy.


Intraterrestrials
(Princeton University Press)
Karen G. Lloyd

Life thrives in the deepest, darkest parts of Earth’s crust—from ocean-floor methane seeps to Arctic permafrost—and it’s unlike anything on the surface. Intraterrestrials explores what scientists are learning about these bizarre microbial forms and how expeditions to extreme environments are reshaping our understanding of life’s nature and origins. Drawing on her own experiences and those of fellow researchers, Karen Lloyd takes readers from the ocean floor to Central American jungles to volcanoes in the Andes. These "intraterrestrials" can live in boiling water, acid, bleach—even breathe rocks or electrons—and some may survive for hundreds of thousands of years. Their strange existence reveals deep branches of the tree of life and expands what we consider possible. Blending storytelling and cutting-edge science, Intraterrestrials shows how Earth’s deep biosphere may hold keys to life on other planets—and our own future.
 

Ice 
(Pushkin Press Classics)
Anna Kavan

Anticipating climate fiction and the New Weird, Anna Kavan’s Ice—praised by Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard, and Patti Smith—feels eerily prophetic. As ice slowly covers the planet and society unravels, a nameless narrator searches for the white-haired girl he once loved—or longs to destroy. Battling a figure known only as the Warden, he travels through surreal, shifting scenes where she is always just out of reach. Guarded and endangered at once, she eludes him time and again—through violence, obsession, and the creeping cold. Kavan’s final published novel delivers a haunting vision of environmental collapse and possessive desire in dreamlike, unforgettable prose.