Blog

January 28th, 2022

On our Front Table this week, find fresh vantage points and frames of reference, from retrospectives of women's movements to new attempts at reckoning with the power of the archive. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.

Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford University Press)
Alva Noë

Philosopher Alva Noë, author of ...

Posted in: Front Table
January 21st, 2022

On our Front Table this week, find revisionist and remixed histories, from a seminal excavation of Black agency in Reconstruction to a reinterpretation of the traditional scholarly trajectory. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.

Sisterlocking Discoarse: Race, Gender, and the Twenty-First-Century Academy (SUNY Press)
Valerie Lee

In...

Posted in: Front Table
January 19th, 2022

On January 24, The Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will present "Digital Emancipation: Augmenting Public Access to and Engagement of Historical Documents" as part of the Cultures & Knowledge Workshop Series. This workshop will be presented by Alisea W. McLeod.

REGISTER HERE

About the presenter: Alisea W. McLeod introduce ongoing historical work, Practices of Emancipation. Over several years, along with John Clegg, the two have transcribed and digitized thousands of obscure primary documents related to the U.S....

Posted in: Bibliographies
January 14th, 2022

On our Front Table this week, explore the relation between art and artist, from an ethical inquiry into engagement with putatively immoral cultural figures, to essays on the private lives of poets and the question of their legacies. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.


Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s (Verso)
by Sheila Rowbotham

In this powerful memoir, Sheila Rowbotham looks back at her life as a participant in the women's liberation movement, left politics and the creative radical culture of a decade in which freedom and equality...

Posted in: Front Table
January 7th, 2022

On our Front Table this week, explore histories of American cultural movements, from a new reckoning with the Transcendentalists' political impacts to an account of the New York School painters and their legacy in American art. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.

The Art of Revision: The Last Word  (Graywolf Press)
Peter Ho Davies

In The Art of Revision: The Last Word, Peter Ho Davies takes up an often discussed yet frequently...

Posted in: Front Table
December 28th, 2021

Born in Shen Village in Southeast China in 1970, Shen Fuyu grew up in a family of farmers. Years later, Shen, now a writer, returned to his hometown to capture the village’s rich history in the face of industrialization. The Artisans, his first book published in English (translated by Jeremy Tiang) is out today from Astra House. Below, he answers some questions about his process and inspirations in bringing his hometown to life.

You mention in the introduction of the book that once you left Shen Village at age 18, every time you returned it had changed for the worse—declining population, crumbling houses, and the encroachment of industrialization. Can you talk about this realization and how the...

Posted in: Miscellaneous
December 3rd, 2021

On our Front Table this week, find new insights on classical art, from an analysis of the prescriptive portrayal of women in Western art to a new history of American classical music that makes room for previously excluded Black American composers. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.


Aftermath (Transit Books)
Preti Taneja

Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related...

Posted in: Front Table
December 1st, 2021


On this episode of Open Stacks, the last of the fourth season, Mikki Kendall remembers a childhood at 57th Street Books and the reading that shapes her writing. We also hear from old friends Jack Cella and Colin McDonald, and from booksellers on the books they return to year after year.


Mikki Kendall is an author, activist, and cultural critic. She's the author of Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot, and ...

Posted in: Open Stacks Podcast
November 24th, 2021

On our Front Table this week, find attempts to debunk mythological thinking, from a critique of climate miseducation, to a synthesis of recent anthropological research designed to challenge everything we think about early human societies. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth...

Posted in: Front Table
November 19th, 2021

On our Front Table this week, find new cultural histories, from a retrospective on the first Black woman to hold a solo exhibition at the Whitney, to an analysis of the cultural construction of a "Belle Époque," and first-hand accounts of the history of Black cowboys. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.

Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful (Yale...

Posted in: Front Table