Blog

June 3rd, 2022

On our Front Table this week, listen to language in new lights, from the aesthetic vocabularies of sub-Saharan art to lexical excavations in Old English. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com


Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 (Liveright)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, tr. Marjorie Perloff

During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, one of our foremost scholars of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime...

Posted in: Front Table
May 27th, 2022


On our Front Table this week, make connections across distance, from ties that bind in fiction, philosophy and art, to chains of global relations linked by a humble wild mushroom. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com


Diplomatic Gifts: A History in Fifty Presents (Hurst & Co.)
Paul Brummell

Gifts have been part of international relations since ancient times. They can serve as tokens of friendship, apology or authority; as taunts,...

Posted in: Front Table
May 22nd, 2022

On our Front Table this week, disassemble the mechanics of power, from the necropolitics of yellow fever in Antebellum New Orleans to the strategic conniving of shellfish, rodents, and corvids. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com


Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (Random House)
Robert D. Kaplan

In this insightful travelogue, Robert D. Kaplan turns his perceptive eye to a region that for centuries has been a meeting point of cultures, trade, and ideas. Often overlooked, the Adriatic is in fact at the center of some of the...

Posted in: Front Table
May 13th, 2022

On our Front Table this week, weigh contradictory impulses, from artists negotiating contested motherhoods to fractious communities formed in prison. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com


The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem (W. W. Norton & Company)
Julie Phillips

With fierce empathy, Julie Phillips evokes the intimate and varied struggles of brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. These mothers had one child, or five, or seven. They worked in a studio, in the kitchen, in the car...

Posted in: Front Table
May 12th, 2022


We are honored to help the University of North Carolina Press celebrate their 100th anniversary! Established in 1922, UNC Press was the first university press in the South and one of the first in the nation. Today, the imprint of UNC Press is recognized worldwide as a mark of publishing excellence. With strong focuses on American history, regional culture and history, and African American studies, their books explore important questions, spark lively debates, generate ideas, and move fields of inquiry forward. Below, find a few of our favorite UNC Press titles. 


Barbecue (2016)
John Shelton Reed...

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May 10th, 2022

On May 23rd, at noon, The Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will present "Visualizing Planetary Urbanization: Critical Spatial Media and the Critique of Urban Ideologies" as part of the Cultures & Knowledge Workshop Series. This workshop will be presented by Alexander Arroyo, Grga Basic & Neil Brenner.

This presentation will take place both online in person at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge (5737 South University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637).

REGISTER FOR THE ONLINE EVENT HERE
REGISTER FOR THE IN-PERSON EVENT HERE...

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May 6th, 2022

On our Front Table this week, sink into selections of new and reissued fiction and poetry, from the viscous loneliness of small town life to the lush violence of romance across borders, revolutions, and other divides. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com


Astra Magazine: Ectasy, Issue 1 (Astra House)
Edited by Nadja Spiegelman

Astra Magazine...

Posted in: Front Table
May 5th, 2022

Henry A. Giroux, the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy and Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University, was kind enough to share this reading list of works that feel in conversation with or informed his latest book, Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance, published by Bloomsbury last month. Find Professor Giroux's introduction and the list of titles below.


In the post-Trump era, the politics of historical amnesia, disappearance and disposability continue to thrive. Trump may have lost the election in 2020, but his influence is everywhere, and one consequence is that public values are continually denigrated and undermined by the politicians who...

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April 29th, 2022

On our Front Table this week, relearn perennial modes of thought, from rereading K'iche myth in light of the current pandemic to reviewing world history in terms of elemental colors. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com


The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity (Princeton University Press)
Marshall Sahlins

From the perspective of Western...

Posted in: Front Table
April 28th, 2022

2022 marks the 60th anniversary of the MIT Press, born in 1962 out of expansion efforts from MIT’s original publishing arm, the Technology Press. In the years since, the MIT Press has grown into one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading global publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. Below, find a few of our favorite MIT titles.


Returning to Reims (2013)
Didier Eribon

"Didier Eribon is currently a professor of Sociology at the University of Amiens. His memoir is the story his coming to terms with the working class community and family...

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