Blog

On This Week's Front Table, unveil long-lost Shakespearean secrets, dive into the lives of prominent artists, and dig into two riveting works of translated fiction. 

Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint
(Scribner)
Lee Durkee

Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. Whisking us backward in...

On This Week's Front Table, delve into a daring new work of sociology exploring disability, marvel at a literary classic in a newly available translation, and probe life on our planet from the microscopic to an epochal world map.

Crip Negativity
(University of Minnesota Press)
J. Logan Smilges

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and...

On This Week's Front Table, explore complexities of identity and connection, from reimagining Western art through the lens of Black subjects to the experiences of asylum seekers at the U.S. border; dive into histories of environmental and human nature; and soak up summer with some award-winning fiction. 

Rediscovering Black Portraiture
(Getty Publications)
Peter Brathwaite

Join Peter Brathwaite on an extraordinary journey through representations of Black subjects in Western art, from medieval Europe through the present day. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Brathwaite has...