Front Table Newsletter 9/8/23

On This Week's Front Table, we delve into the spiritual essence of art, embark on soul-enriching quests for personal and collective growth, and heed the urgent calls to community-based action: A look at a Manhattan street which was once the vibrant epicenter of the art world, tracing the evolution of literary criticism, envisioning the future of bookselling, and an immersion of a sweeping collection of poems that intricately narrate the complex history of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Additionally, a critical exploration of the Supreme Court, a captivating epic narrative of a mother driven to perilous extremes, and a thought-provoking collection of essays showcasing the lesser-known non-fiction contributions of the influential late Randall Kenan. Discover these titles and more at semcoop.com.

The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
(HarperCollins)
Prudence Peiffer

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art.  

Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read
(Yale University Press)
Terry Eagleton

Before the First World War, traditional literary scholarship was isolated from society at large. In the years following, a younger generation of critics came to the fore. Their work represented a reaction to the impoverishment of language in a commercial, utilitarian society increasingly under the sway of film, advertising, and the popular press. For them, literary criticism was a way of diagnosing social ills and had a vital moral function to perform.

Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings by Randall Kenan
(W.W. Norton)
Randall Kenan

A personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction.

Virtuosic in his use of literary forms, nurtured and unbounded by his identities as a Black man, a gay man, an intellectual, and a Southerner, Randall Kenan was known for his groundbreaking fiction. Less visible were his extraordinary nonfiction essays, published as introductions to anthologies and in small journals, revealing countless facets of Kenan’s life and work.

Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence is Destroying the Court - and How We Can Fix It
(Yale University Press)
Aaron Tang

The Supreme Court, once the most respected institution in American government, is now routinely criticized for rendering decisions based on the individual justices’ partisan leanings rather than on a faithful reading of the law. For legal scholar Aaron Tang, however, partisanship is not the Court’s root problem. Overconfidence is.
 
Conservative and liberal justices alike have adopted a tone of uncompromising certainty in their ability to solve society’s problems with just the right lawyerly arguments. The result is a Court that lurches stridently from one case to the next, delegitimizing opposing views and undermining public confidence in itself.

How to Protect Bookstores and Why: The Present and Future of Bookselling
(Microcosm Publishing)
Danny Caine

Can bookstores save the world? As bastions of culture, anchors of local retail districts, community gathering places, and sources of new ideas, inspiration, and delight, maybe they can. But only if we protect them and the critical roles they fill in our communities.

At once an urgent call to action and a celebration of everything bookstores can do, Caine's new book features case-study profiles of a dozen of the most interesting and innovative bookstores of today, from Minneapolis to Paris. Through a well-informed analysis of these case studies, Caine offers actionable strategies to promote a sustainable future for bookselling, including policy suggestions, ideas for community-based action, and tips on what consumers can do to help

Lojman
(City Lights Books)
Ebru Ojen

Abandoned by her husband, marooned by an epic snowstorm, a mother gives birth to her third child. Her sense of entrapment turns into a desperate rage in this unblinking portrait of a woman whose powerlessness becomes lethal.

Written in startling, raw prose, this novel – the author’s first to be translated into English – is reminiscent of Elena Ferrante’s masterful Days of Abandonment, though its private dramas are made all the more vivid against an imposing natural landscape that exerts a powerful, life-threatening force.

Information Desk: An Epic
(Penguin Random House)
Robyn Schiff

Robyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.