Front Table Newsletter 9/16

On this week’s Front Table, witness the moral struggle of civilians tasked with border control and a family grappling with their mothers death in 1980s Detroit. Reflect on a new vision for the entangling of two opposing philosophical traditions and explore the science of grief and the how the Black identity ties into it. Finally, revisit a classic, queer coming-of-age story and rediscover early Black Atlantic music. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom
(Stanford University Press)
Jensen Suther

Although interest in both Marxism and German Idealism has exploded, the discourse around the two traditions has grown stagnant and is still defined by the same century-old debates--materialism versus idealism, history versus logic, revolution versus reform. Jensen Suther endeavors to transform this discourse by presenting an unprecedented systematic vision of the possibility of a Hegelian Marxism, grounded in Aristotle's logic of living form.


Starlight and Moonshine
(Delphinium Books)
Joseph O'Malley

In early 1980s Detroit, during the year following the drunk driving death of their alcoholic mother, a chorus of family voices grapple with haunting memories of the joys, regrets and the strains of love that will reverberate throughout all of their lives.


Sorrow's Long Road: The Science of Grief
(Columbia University Press)
Barbara Blatchley

After the research psychologist Barbara Blatchley lost her husband and partner of thirty-six years, her life changed utterly. Seeking to understand the pain and confusion she felt, Blatchley began exploring the psychology and neuroscience of bereavement. Why does grief last so long and hurt so much? How do we come to terms with loss?


Lullaby for the Grieving
(Hub City Press)
Ashley M. Jones

In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for "progress"?


Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo
(University of North Carolina Press)
Kristina R. Gaddy & Rhiannon Giddens

For the first time, this groundbreaking songbook collaboration makes nineteen examples of early Black Atlantic music accessible and playable for today's musicians, music enthusiasts, and historians. Presenting music from 1687 through the 1860s in modern treble clef and banjo tablature, along with the rich stories behind each song, Gaddy and Giddens take readers on a journey from the Caribbean across the Americas.


Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
(Grove Press)
Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial north of England. Her youth is spent embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household collapses. 


The Gates of the Sea
(Fernwood Publishing)
Luna Vives 

Focusing on Spain, Vives explores how governments have redefined maritime rescue systems towards border control. Spain chose to assign this responsibility to a civilian agency whose workers are dedicated to saving lives, not enforcing borders. Caught between their duty to protect life at sea and government efforts to transform them into border enforcers, rescuers have pushed back. Committed to border abolition and international solidarity, the rescuers' struggle positions them within a global movement of resistance to the politics of organized abandonment along the external borders of the European Union.