June 9th Front Table Newsletter

On This Week's Front Table, we are introduced to practical and imaginative resources on how to create a more liberated world through reparations and mutual aid, to essays exploring the wildness of nature and animals, to gripping short story collections from new cutting edge voices in Latin American literature. Browse these and more at semcoop.com. 

Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care
(Haymarket Books)
Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.

The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice
(University of California Press)
Edited by William Darity, A. Kirsten Mullen, and Lucas Hubbard 

This groundbreaking resource moves us from theory to action with a practical plan for reparations. A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars—members of the Reparations Planning Committee—who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. Rigorous and comprehensive, The Black Reparations Project will motivate, guide, and speed the final leg of the journey for justice.

The Heartbeat of the Wild:
Dispatches from Landscapes of Wonder, Peril, and Hope
(National Geographic)
David Quammen

In this inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed author David Quammen journeys to places where civilization meets raw nature and explores the challenge of balancing the needs of both.

Quammen shares encounters with African elephants, chimpanzees, and gorillas (and their saviors, including Jane Goodall); the salmon of northeastern Russia and the people whose livelihood depends on them; the lions of Kenya and the villagers whose homes border on parks created to preserve the species; and the champions of rewilding efforts in southernmost South America, designed to rescue iconic species including jaguars and macaws. With a new introduction, afterword, and notes framing each story, Quammen reminds us of the essential role played by wild nature at the heart of the planet.


Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: Along the Seine
(Yale University Press)
Edited by Bregje Gerritse and Jacquelyn N. Coutre

Now on exhibit through Sep. 4th at the Art Institute of Chicago

An examination of the innovative portrayals of industry and leisure created by five avant-garde artists working at Asnières in the late nineteenth century. From 1881 to 1890, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand chose Asnières, a suburb of Paris, as a site of artistic experimentation. Homing in on the tensions between leisure and work, the avant-garde artists at Asnières sought to capture the feeling of this starkly modern landscape by developing innovative motifs, styles, and techniques that pushed their work in new directions. 

The Guest: A Novel
(Random House)
By Emma Cline

A young woman pretends to be someone she isn’t in this “spellbinding” (Vogue), “smoldering” (The Washington Post) novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls. Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline’s The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.


Cousins
(Soft Skull Press)
Aurora Venturini, tr. Kit Maude

Cousins, widely regarded as Venturini’s masterpiece, is the story of four women from an impoverished, dysfunctional family in La Plata, Argentina, who are forced to suffer through a series of ordeals, including illegal abortions, miscarriages, sexual abuse, disfigurement, and murder, narrated by a daughter whose success as a painter offers her a chance to achieve economic independence and help her family as best as she can.

Never before translated into English, this darkly comic masterpiece showcases Aurora Venturini as a major voice in Latin American literature.


Human Sacrifices
(The Feminist Press)
María Fernanda Ampuero, tr. Frances Riddle

This acclaimed short story collection by a groundbreaking voice in contemporary Latin American literature confronts machismo, inequity, and violence. Simultaneously terrifying and exquisite, Human Sacrifices is “tropical gothic” at its finest—decay and oppression underlie our humid and hostile world, where working-class women and children are consistently the weakest links in a capitalist economy. Against this backdrop of corrosion and rot, these twelve stories contemplate the nature of exploitation and abuse, illuminating the realities of those society consumes for its own pitiless ends.