Front Table Newsletter 5/5

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
(Bloomsbury Publishing)
William Dalrymple

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world - and our world today as we know it.

The Accidentals: Stories
(Bloomsbury Publishing)
Guadalupe Nettel; Rosalind Harvey (trans.)

Acclaimed author Guadalupe Nettel introduces us to eight characters who are each in their own way lost and wandering, struggling to connect with the people around them. A young woman finding an unexpected affinity with an estranged uncle, a frustrated actor who unknowingly begins to take over the life and house of a more successful former colleague, a woman who lives with her children in a dying world where it is better to be asleep than awake. With a bold, stark style of writing that makes this work a revelation, this stunning collection interrogates humanity's struggle to communicate and reveals the universal longing for connection.


Ancestors: Identity and DNA in the Levant
(Random House)
Pierre Zalloua

In recent years, genetic testing has become easily available across the globe, making it relatively simple to find out where your ancestors came from. In Ancestors, Pierre Zalloua, a leading authority on population genetics, argues that these test results have led to a dangerous oversimplification of what one's genetic heritage means. Nowhere is this interplay more important and more controversial, Zalloua writes, than in the Levant--an ancient region known as one of the cradles of civilization and that now includes Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Turkey. Born in Lebanon, Zalloua grew up surrounded by people for whom the question of identity was a matter of life or death. A timely, paradigm-shifting investigation into ancestry and origins in the Middle East, Ancestors ultimately reframes what it means to be indigenous to any land--urging us to reshape how we think about home, belonging, and where culture really comes from.


Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel
(Ecco)
Shelby Van Pelt

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late. 


The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East
(Princeton University Press)
Fawaz A. Gerges

The Middle East is in upheaval: a widening chasm between state and society, the failure of governing elites to address citizens' genuine grievances, massive economic mismanagement--all made worse by repeated interventions by Western powers. In The Great Betrayal, Fawaz Gerges argues that the convergence of political authoritarianism, meddling by the West, and the effects of prolonged regional conflicts have produced political paralysis and economic stagnation. The agency of everyday people has been thwarted by an authoritarian status quo that is maintained by a powerful partnership of external and internal forces. Gerges is optimistic, declaring that the region's future will be determined not by dictators and their superpower patrons but by a growing population of Arab and Muslim youth who demand to be treated as citizens and not as subjects.


In Universes: A Novel
(Harper Perennial)
Emet North

Raffi works in an observational cosmology lab, searching for dark matter and trying to hide how little they understand their own research. Every chance they get, they escape to see Britt, a queer sculptor who fascinates them for reasons they also can't understand. As Raffi's carefully constructed life begins to collapse, they become increasingly fixated on the multiverse and the idea that somewhere, there may be a universe where they mean as much to Britt as Britt does to them . . . and just like that, Raffi and Britt are thirteen years old, on the cusp of friendship, and maybe something more. Blending realism with science fiction, In Universes is a mind-bending tour across parallel worlds, each an answer to the question of what Raffi's life would be like if they had made slightly different choices. The universes grow increasingly strange: women fracture into hordes of animals; alien-possessed bears prowl apocalyptic landscapes, and across worlds, Raffi reaches for a life that feels authentically their own.


The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation
(Princeton University Press)
Charlotte Beradt; Damion Searls (trans.)

Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these "diaries of the night" in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one. This book brings together this uniquely powerful dream record, offering a visceral understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination.