Front Table Newsletter 6/30

The Slip: A Novel
(Simon & Schuster)
Lucas Schaefer

Austin, Texas: It’s the summer of 1998, and sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein--though he has never felt comfortable in his own skin--comes into his own under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym. Even his slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, notices the change. Happier, more confident—tanner, even. Until one night, Nathaniel vanishes. Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” undergoes his own teenage transformation, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body. As an unlikely romance blooms, X feels like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple. Over a decade later, Bob receives a shocking tip and opens his own investigation into Nathaniel’s disappearance. The search involves gymgoers past and present, including a twin and his opportunistic brother, a determined rookie cop, and Alexis Cepeda, who crossed the US-Mexico border at fourteen with a license bearing the wrong name and face. The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.

The Tiny Things are Heavier
(Bloomsbury Publishing)
Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo

The Tiny Things Are Heavier follows Sommy, a Nigerian woman who comes to the United States for graduate school two weeks after her brother, Mezie, attempts suicide. Plagued by guilt, she struggles to fit into her new life as a student and immigrant. Lonely and homesick, Sommy enters a complicated relationship with her boisterous Nigerian roommate, Bayo, which plummets when she falls for Bryan, a biracial American whose estranged Nigerian father left the States after his birth. Bonded by unbelonging and a vague sense of kinship, Sommy and Bryan transcend the challenges of their new relationship. During summer break, they visit Lagos, Nigeria, where Sommy hopes to reconcile with Mezie and Bryan plans to connect with his father. But when a shocking event throws their lives into disarray, Sommy is forced to confront her notions of self and familial love. A daring and ambitious novel rendered in stirring, tender prose, The Tiny Things Are Heavier explores the hardships of migration, the subtleties of Nigeria’s class system, and how far we’ll go to protect those we love.

Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings
(Harper)
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression. In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy.

Race and the Question of Palestine
(Stanford University Press)
Edited by Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin

Race and the Question of Palestine develops from the position that the colonization of Palestine—like other imperial and settler colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Offering a wide-ranging set of essays by historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and race critical theorists, this collection illuminates how race should be understood in terms of its political work, and not as an identity category interchangeable with ethnicity, culture, or nationalism. Essays build on a long-standing tradition of theorizing race in Palestine studies and speak to four interconnected themes—the politics of racialization and regimes of race, racism and antiracism, race and capital accumulation, and Black–Palestinian solidarity. These engagements challenge the exceptionalism of the Palestinian case, and stress the importance of locating Palestine within global histories and present politics of imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

It's Not the End of the World: A Novel
(Bloomsbury Publishing)
Jonathan Parks-Ramage

It's 2044 and life is bleak for many Americans, but not for Mason Daunt. Safe in his Los Angeles mansion, Mason can remain blissfully unaware of the relentless wildfires engulfing California, the proliferation of violent right-wing militias, and the rampant authoritarianism destroying American society. He's so rich, in fact, that he and his partner Yunho Kim are throwing a 100-person, $100,000 baby shower to celebrate their newborn-on-the-way. When a potentially apocalyptic event hits Los Angeles on the day of their celebration, though, the wealthy gay couple refuses to cancel their party. Surely it’s not the end of the world? But as Mason runs a few last-minute errands, a staggering twist thrusts him into the mounting chaos, and threatens the lives of everyone he holds dear. Shot through with biting wit, brutal gore, primal sex, and unexpected catharsis, It's Not the End of the World is a roller coaster of a novel that will leave readers shocked, heartbroken, and inspired to question their convictions. What happens when our current battles with climate change, capitalism, and white supremacy are pushed to their breaking points? How can we find hope?

No Exit: Contemporary American Literature and the State
(University of Virginia Press)
Seth McKelvey

From hippie culture to neoliberalism to Black Lives Matter, anti-state sentiment and rhetoric persists through varying—and sometimes electorally opposed—forms in American politics and culture. Examining the work of some of the leading authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—including William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Richard Wright, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, Juliana Spahr, and Nathaniel Mackey—Seth McKelvey offers a new perspective on American literature’s many conceptions of an escape from the political state. Through close readings of texts varied in their political orientations, historical concerns, literary genres, and aesthetic commitments, No Exit reveals a provocative overlap between literary and political representation, showing just how urgent yet difficult it has been for American literature to imagine leaving the state behind.