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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...

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...

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 ...