Front Table Newsletter 7/22

On this week’s Front Table, examine transnational movements for justice: from young activists in Asia to Argentine grandmothers searching for stolen children, and even the calculated racial engineering of Southern American cities. Next, explore how bodies, gender, and queer desire are expressed in the face of shame, grief, and hope. Finally, live the surreal realities of Brazilian-American immigrant life haunted by ambition, fear, longing, and ghosts of the living. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com. 

The Milk Tea Alliance
(Columbia Global Reports)
Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The political situations in Burma, Thailand, and Hong Kong are radically different. Only Burma is in a state of civil war. Only Hong Kong has changed in just a few years from a place with virtually no political prisoners to one with many. Only Thailand is a monarchy with lèse-majesté laws. Yet, many young activists and exiles from these regions feel that their struggles are connected. Historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom met dozens of activists expressing solidarity with one another online and on the streets, and sometimes refer to themselves as belonging to the “Milk Tea Alliance,” a nod to their shared opposition to nationalistic Beijing loyalists and the fact that their cultures' iconic drinks contain dairy, unlike mainland China’s traditional tea. How do these activists, each facing their unique situations, find common ground and sustain one another? Wasserstrom traveled globally to interview members of this loosely constituted alliance, meeting some in Asia and others in exile, finding them united by democratic values, shared concerns over autocrats, and the rising influence of a common adversary—the Chinese Communist Party.


A Flower Traveled in My Blood
(Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)
Haley Cohen Gilliland

In the early hours of March 24, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumbles with tanks as soldiers seize the presidential palace and topple Argentina’s leader. With quiet support from the United States and tacit approval from much of Argentina’s people, the new military junta swiftly launches the National Reorganization Process or El Proceso—a bland name masking their ruthless campaign to crush the political left and instill the country with “Western, Christian” values. One of the military’s most diabolical acts is kidnapping hundreds of pregnant women. After giving birth in captivity, the women are “disappeared,” and their babies secretly given to other families—many of them headed by police or military officers. Fierce grandmothers form the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, dedicated to finding the stolen infants and seeking justice from a nation that betrayed them. At a time when speaking out could mean death, the Abuelas confront military officers and launch protests to reach international diplomats and journalists, become detectives, and even work alongside a renowned American scientist to pioneer groundbreaking genetic tests. A Flower Traveled in My Blood is the product of years of extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting. A regime tries to terrorize a country, but love prevails.


Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools
(The University of North Carolina Press)
Karen Benjamin

Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools examines how white residential developers, planning consultants, and their allies in government strategically replaced block-level segregation with segregation at the neighborhood level in New South cities such as Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Houston, Raleigh, and Winston-Salem. Going beyond the well-known Home Owners' Loan Corporation maps of the 1930s, Karen Benjamin traces segregation tactics back to the late nineteenth century, when this public-private partnership laid the groundwork for the nationwide segregation strategies codified by the New Deal. This book links the tactics of residential and school segregation to prevailing middle-class ideas about what constitutes good parenting, ensuring the longevity of both practices. By focusing on efforts that specifically targeted parents, Benjamin not only adds a new dimension to the history of residential segregation but also helps explain why that legacy has been so difficult to undo.


Oddbody
(Simon & Schuster)
Rose Keating

In her debut collection, Rose Keating takes you on a bold journey through the intricacies of sex, shame, and womanhood. With ten enchanting short stories, she crafts an emotional masterpiece that challenges us to reflect on the movement and needs of our bodies. Strange yet utterly mesmerizing, Oddbody is a provocative exploration that feels both surprising and sincerely authentic. In “Oddbody,” a woman finds herself navigating a codependent relationship with a ghost, while “Squirm” portrays a daughter tending to her father as he devours himself from the inside out. “Pineapple” introduces us to a woman who opts to have feather wings surgically attached to her back. In “Eggshells,” a waitress gives birth to an egg during her breakfast shift. Each narrative in this collection is immersive, bizarre, and deeply empathetic, shining a light on women who dare to defy societal norms and invite you to question the conventions and milestones that determine success.


A Language of Limbs
(Dutton)
Dylin Hardcastle

Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or stay the course? In alternating chapters, we trace the two versions of a life that follow.  In one, a teenage girl is caught kissing her neighbor and is kicked out from her home. She lands at a queer communal home in Sydney called Uranian House, where she meets the people who will forever become her family. Meanwhile, in the second, a teenage girl pushes down her lustful dreams of her best friend and eventually makes her way to a university in Sydney to study English literature. During pivotal moments, the physical space between these two women closes—like when they each meet the first great loves of their lives in 1977 at a protest, or when, almost a decade later, they are both rushed to the hospital with only a curtain between them. Through the AIDS crisis—and from classrooms to art galleries, beds to bars and hospitals to homes—we witness these two lives shadow each other until, finally and poignantly, they collide.


Alterations
(Transit Books)
Cori Winrock

A collective of women gathers to painstakingly turn wedding dresses into burial garments for infants. “Like many collectives whose existence and skills might seem unfathomable, most of us won’t know about them until there is a need to know,” writes Winrock. It is when confronted with the loss of her own unborn twin child that Winrock learns of their transformative work and begins to create a garment herself—made of language. Threading together stories of textiles and texts, from the first space suits and the seamstresses who made them, to Emily Dickinson’s famous white dress, to the Steinian rhythms of Goodnight Moon, Winrock constructs and reconstructs an essay that might begin to accommodate devastating loss. A work of process and possibility, Alterations enacts the hidden labors of mourning.


Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
(Tordotcom)
Ananda Lima

At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true. Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging—and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home. With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.”