Front Table Newsletter 8/05

On This Week's Front Table, explore the human-animal relationship that has transformed societies and empires for thousands of years; peruse the covers of comics that never were by a master cartoonist; take a new perspective on the works of an old artist and the lives of unacknowledged children; finally, wander the shifting borders between cultures and the line between rage and comedy. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

The Horse
(Dutton)
Timothy C Winegard

The Horse is an epic history unlike any other. Its story begins more than 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe; when one human tamed one horse, an unbreakable bond was forged and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten, placing the reins of destiny firmly in human hands. Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back. For millennia it was the primary mode of transportation, an essential farming machine, a steadfast companion, and a formidable weapon of war. Possessing a unique combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina, the horse dominated every facet of human life and shaped the very scope of human ambition. And we still live among its galloping shadows.

Horses revolutionized the way we hunted, traded, traveled, farmed, fought, worshipped, and interacted. They fundamentally reshaped the human genome and the world's linguistic map. They determined international borders, molded cultures, fueled economies, and built global superpowers. They decided the destinies of conquerors and empires. And they were vectors of lethal disease and contributed to lifesaving medical innovations. Horses even inspired architecture, invention, furniture, and fashion. Driven by fascinating revelations and fast-paced storytelling, The Horse is a riveting narrative of this noble animal's unrivaled and enduring reign across human history. To know the horse is to understand the world.

Raiders, Rulers, and Traders
(W. W. Norton, Company)
David Chaffetz

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance. Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the thirteenth-century Mongols offer the most famous example, but from ancient Assyria and Persia, to the seventeenth-century Mughals, to the high noon of colonialism in the early twentieth century, horse breeding was indispensable to conquest and statecraft.

Scholar of Asian history David Chaffetz tells the story of how the horse made rulers, raiders, and traders interchangeable, providing a novel explanation for the turbulent history of the "Silk Road," which might be better called the Horse Road. Drawing on recent research in fields including genetics and forensic archeology, Chaffetz presents a lively history of the great horse empires that shaped civilization.

Kommix
(Fantagraphics Books)
Charles Burns

Master cartoonist Charles Burns has never hidden his passion for comic books and pop culture from the 1950 and 1960s. Inspired by the romance, horror, and sci-fi comics of his youth, as well as the 1960s American underground, the author of Black Hole has created a collection of 80 original comic book covers that, through his own inimitable aesthetic, present an alternate universe of stories that never were, but that you will wish existed.

The covers -- some with otherworldly titles in alien letterforms, and others that riff on classic genres (Throbbing Hearts, Unwholesome Love) and eras (Drug Buddy, Huss) -- each inspire a multitude of interpretations, build entire worlds, and suggest entire narratives that lie within their non-existent guts. This is Burns at his most playful, imaginative, and suggestive, using the format of the comic book to continue to explore many of the themes that run through all his longer-form work -- adolescence, metamorphosis, nightmares, and sexuality -- and provide a pretext for the creation of some of the most mysterious and bewitching imagery of Burns's incredible career. Kommix is like discovering an entire box of comic books you never knew existed.

Beckett's Children
(OR Books) 
Michael Coffey

Beckett's Children is a lyrical blend of personal memoir, father-son dialogue, and literary investigation that probes the works of Irish writer Samuel Beckett and American poet Susan Howe in search of traces of their long-rumored status as father and daughter. Although Howe has denied the rumor, the possibility that it might be true leads Coffey to a highly original appreciation of her work and a fascinating focus on the dozens of unattended children who wander through Beckett's oeuvre.

The saga of Coffey's adult son, at various moments on the run in the Indiana woods or incarcerated, shines light on life without parental connection in a cold America. As an adoptee himself, Coffey looks to literature for traces of his own origin story and lineage, a heritage held in secret by a closed adoption system but which, through books and cultural signs, he has been able to decipher in his own way.

Provocative and beautifully expressed, Beckett's Children suggests a new approach to the textual worlds of two highly respected artists, providing a revelatory perspective on both American poetics and the vibrant world of Beckett studies.

Machete
(Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) 
Tomas Q Morin

"Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca" ("God squeezes, but He doesn't strangle")--the epigraph of Machete--sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there's an invisible hand at your throat. Tomás Morín hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore.

In these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire. They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling: "Whiteface" is a list of instructions for people stopped by the police; "Duct Tape" lauds our domestic life from the point of view of the tape itself.

One part Groucho Marx, one part Job, Morín considers our obsession with suffering--"the pain in which we trust"--and finds that the best answer to our predicament is sometimes anger, sometimes laughter, but always via the keen line between them that may be the sharpest weapon we have.

The Plague
(Picador USA)
Jacqueline Rose

In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began to infiltrate public consciousness, sales of The Plague, the classic novel by French philosopher Albert Camus, skyrocketed. At the same time, the virus's toll surged exponentially. Amid the harrowing loss, many sensed a glimmer of possibility--the potential for radical empathy wrought by shared experience--even as the death-dealing divisions of class, race, gender, and citizenship were underscored like never before. We have been through a time of 'living death' when, for millions across the globe, untold horror has seemed to infiltrate the very air we breathe.

Jacqueline Rose's trenchant new book unravels recent history via the lives and works of three extraordinary thinkers--Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil, each one afflicted by catastrophe. Their politics and private griefs, the depth of their understanding, fling open a window into our present crises. Rose, one of the most insightful thinkers on politics and psychoanalysis alike, has written a story of unusual range, spanning World War II to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, surging domestic violence to emboldened anti-racist protest, the Spanish influenza to Omicron, Boris Johnson's deranged optimism to Vladimir Putin's megalomania. The Plague: Living Death in Our Times enacts a psychic reckoning for our moment and for the future to be forged in its aftermath.

Someone Like Us
(Knopf Publishing Group)
Dinaw Mengestu

After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah--a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.

With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.