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Hello, Tumbl-ers! We want to apologize for the lack of updates to this page, and notify you that we are going to be no longer using Tumblr. However, we will leave the site up so that our previous posts will be available, and, for new content, we invite you to visit  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, our up-to-date blog and, of course, at the store!

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For it has come that thus I greet the spring. These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.

Wallace Stevens,  “Monocle de Mon Oncle"

Our blog has moved! Find reading lists, commentaries, poems and events at  semcoop.com/blog. 

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Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter: A Selected Bibliography

Elizabeth A. I. Powell is also the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her work has appeared in "Alaska Quarterly Review," "Barrow Street," "Black Warrior Review," "Ecotone," "Harvard Review," "Handsome," "Indiana Review," "Missouri Review," "Ploughshares," "Post Road," and elsewhere. Powell serves as Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at Johnson State College and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing and Publishing. Catch Powell in person on Sat. 4/1 at 57th Street Books. RSVP and details here.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet

Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello

Life Studies by Robert Lowell

The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath

The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Modern Critical Views, Arthur Miller by Harold Bloom

The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino (which actor Matthew McConaughey said changed his life).

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter by Joni Mitchell

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In Short: Elena Passarello

Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards and was a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been published in "Oxford American," "Slate," "Creative Nonfiction," and "The Iowa Review," among other publications, as well as in the 2015 anthologies Cat is Art Spelled Wrong and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essay. Passarello reads from Animals Strike Curious Poses, Wednesday, March 29 at 57th Street Books. RSVP and details here. 

Mike quickly figured out he could no longer crow. The few times he attempted to—hunkering into a center-stage chicken squat and fexing his wings—he only managed a low rumble in his belly. It felt like being buried under a mound of mud. It sounded like a kitchen sink with drain trouble. The gurgle and choke made Oley run for the eyedropper to squeeze Mike’s clogged neck-hole clear.

A shame, thought Oley and Clara. They could’ve upped the admission at least a dime for crowing. I mean, look how the crowds clamored when Mike gave ’em the littlest wing fap. But charging more than a quarter for a bird that mostly sat there just wasn’t Christian, head or no head. Plus, the show already ran on sin; that head in the Mason jar next to Mike was bogus. Back home in Fruita, Colorado, Clara’s tabby had run away with Mike’s God-given head, so Oley pickled a decoy to take on the road.

The newshounds came out to Fruita with their notepads, as did the zoological types with their magnifying lenses. They ate up Clara’s gravy pie and gawked at Mike’s spared brain stem and fled their stories from the feld: “Beheaded Chicken Calmly Lives On” and “Headless Chicken Alive and Gaining Weight.” After the mentions in Life and the Guinness Book and the all-expenses-paid trip to the lab in Salt Lake—around the time tongues were wagging about Oley’s new-bought hay baler and his fresh-of-the-lot Chevy pickup—another rumor must’ve brewed that Fruita water helped chicken blood clot. After that, you couldn’t swing an axe without hitting some Fruitan who’d pinned down his own Wyandotte, frst squinting himself as cockeyed as they imagined Oley to be. They’d miss the opening stroke on purpose to heat the blade, then they’d slice through the hackle feathers at a diagonal, sparing the base of the neck, where most of the chicken-brain hunkers low in a corner. Then the family would watch as the rooster’s head rolled.

The birds usually staggered of the blocks and stepped—one, two, three—before toppling into the dirt. A few stayed alive for the afternoon, or past sundown, or maybe even into the next day—the whole farm white-knuckled and unblinking until the birds bled out, or bashed into the stovepipe, or fell of the porch, or something. Mike could’ve told them: staying alive without a head is tricky.

The old men at Fruita’s Monument Café went on record that they couldn’t care less. Outside the Monument, though, the little girls with jump ropes demanded answers: “Mike, Mike, where is your head? Even without it, you aren’t dead!” One article answered the girls, saying Mike wasn’t dead because his will to live was “almost human.” But where in a headless chicken does this almost-human willpower lie? Nobody thought to ask that, and Mike obviously wasn’t talking.

It can’t live in his cocksureness, since crowing was of limits and his gone head scared the hens away. Could the will be vascular, then? A coagulative will? The simple will of platelets, thrombin, and myelin to keep godlessly plugging and sheathing? Or could Mike have the same will of those brachiosaur bones hanging tough in the Fruita shale, waiting for their second acts as hair combs, figurines—curios you have to be careful not to break while dusting the mantel?

He could have willed himself to fight the sure thing that is human folly, a noble course for any animal in the kingdom. Perhaps he already knew, that sharp night on the block, that Clara’s mother was visiting and making Oley’s axe hand anxious. He couldn’t help but reckon that, at some point, Oley would let that head-thieving cat out of his sights. He probably bet his bottom chicken dollar that one of these evenings, after the show, in one of these dank motor inns, he’d choke up, only to learn that Oley had left his crucial eyedropper at the last tour stop, two hundred miles in the dust.

What if Mike stayed alive, ghost head shaking in disgust, just to see what those two would cock up next? But perhaps it’s best for all involved to think that Mike’s will was something else altogether. Some living things harbor another nervous system—one that pushes them past simply crowing, past just chasing hens, and even past the natural order. What’s the harm, really, in saying that Mike stayed alive for the promise of a tiny tent twisting with reverb? Or for cheers so loud he could feel them in the bumps of his skin? For the good burn of hot lights sizzling with moth wings, Clara’s starstruck touch on his back, or the soft fuzz of a hotel blanket in place of chicken wire and an apple box. For fan mail simply addressed to “the Headless Chicken in Colorado” that the post ofce knew to deliver to Mike’s farm.

Let’s tell ourselves this was what pushed him forward—eighteen months past one final lap around the yard and a headless roast. Maybe that same will to remain a rooster for five hundred unseen sun-ups is the will of Ziegfeld, of flash bulbs, of Borscht Belts, of gotta-dance. Of take my hen, please, (badump bump) and “Doc, my head hurts when I do this!” “Well, then you better not do that,”(badump bump) and Momma always said don’t count your chickens before they’re axed, (badump bump) and Rooster? I barely know ’er! (badump bump). Maybe Mike always knew that, in this world, baby? You’re gonna need a gimmick if you truly wanna get ahead.

Used with permission from @sarabandebooks 

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In Short: Boris Fishman

Boris Fishman was born in Belarus and has lived in the United States since the age of nine. He is the author of the novel A Replacement Life, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, and other publications. He lives in New York City. Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo is his second novel. Catch Boris Fishman, in conversation with  S.L. Wisenberg, Saturday, March 25 at KAM Isaiah Israel. RSVP and details here. 

Maya had been early to pick up Max the day he didn’t come home with the school bus. Usually she was still powering up Sylvan Gate Drive when the old yellow bus sputtered to its crown, the doors exhaled, and Max tumbled out, always before the Kroon girl because Max always took the front seat. Even in the family Corolla, it was Alex at the wheel, Max in the passenger seat, and Maya in the back. Maya had gathered that the popular children sat back of the bus. She had asked Max once why he wasn’t among them. “There’s too much noise in the back,” he had said, and she had felt a hidden satisfaction at his indifference.

That day, after a week of disabling warmth premature even for New Jersey in June, a note of unhumid reprieve had snuck into the air—Maya had caught it on her drive home from the hospital—and so she had walked out of the town house early. On the rare occasions Alex was home early enough to collect Max, he drove the thousand yards to the head of the drive—Alex enjoyed the very American possibility of this convenience. But Maya walked. She was on her feet all day at the hospital, but she shuttled between three rooms and it was all indoors.

In Kiev, Maya’s mother had always awaited her by the school doors, painted and repainted until they looked like lumpy old women. The walk home was time alone for mother and daughter; by the time they reached their apartment, Maya’s father would already be at the kitchen table slouched over the sports section, the only part of the newspaper where things didn’t have to be perfect. Maya’s mother would begin their walk by asking all the questions a mother was required to ask of a daughter’s school day—even as an eight-year-old, Max’s age, Maya understood this as a formality—but then, after a discreet pause, Galina Shulman would bring her daughter up to date on the indiscreet doings of “the great circus” of their thousand-apartment apartment building.

Maya was exhilarated by these walks for she felt her mother spoke as if Maya was not present, or if she were, then as an equal, a friend, not a daughter to whom convention described responsibilities. So—a silent hello to a woman now five thousand miles away—Maya picked up Max from the school bus. It wasn’t particularly necessary—the danger was not in the distance Max would have to cover down to their town house, but in his time out in the world. But it was Maya’s only time alone with her son. She used it to try to understand why she couldn’t always speak with Max in the same easy, unspooling way her mother had spoken with her. Maya did not have her mother’s imagination; that was part of it, certainly. Nor did she have her mother’s curiosity about her neighbors, though Maya knew that this was a failure of her looking, not their living. But none of that seemed the answer. Maya asked her son about school, questions he answered politely and briefly—she never failed to marvel at the unkinked Russian speech of her not-Russian son—and then both fell silent. All she could think was to take his hand, and he let her hold it. She felt she was failing him in some way. Failing him, and couldn’t say how; she felt thick and graceless. 

They had been lucky, the adoption supervisor had kept reminding them, as if he worked on commission. American parents often had to go abroad to find children: Malaysia, Korea, Romania. Bribes, endless waiting, no medical records. Whereas the Rubins got an outright American. Who got an American any longer, and a brand-new baby instead of a child old enough to have been terrorized by somebody else? Maya had the ungrateful thought that she did not want an American: She felt that she would have more to say to a Romanian child. In the sleepless hold of another interminable night, she had shaken awake Alex and said so. He closed his fingertips around the knob of her shoulder, as if she were a loose lightbulb: “He’s a newborn. Was New Jersey familiar to you when you moved here? This house? But now it’s all home.” He turned onto his side, cupped one of her breasts from behind, and said: “Sleep, Maya—please.”

She had picked out the weary magnanimousness in his voice—he had to indulge not only her willingness to adopt, but her anxieties over it. Only who wanted a child more than he did? However, a biological solution being impossible, Alex’s desire had just one condition—that he not be made to confess it. And so she carried on as the secret advocate for them both. His contribution was to disparage the woe conjured up by her railroad mind at two in the morning. “Railroad mind”—that was Alex’s term for the hive of Maya’s brain. Railroads made him think of motion, steam, frantic activity. What he really meant was that she was like some Anna Karenina—superfluously melodramatic. And Maya understood what he really meant only because she had a railroad mind.

Alex had been ten years younger than Maya’s eighteen when his family had come to America; the Rubins had come for good, whereas Maya had come on an exchange program in 1988, the first year such things were possible. After college, Maya was supposed to return to the USSR—a plan altered by her love affair with Alex and the end of the USSR. Alex had taken to America—he spoke with confidence about Wall Street, the structure of Congress, technology. Maya conceded his authority. Only once had she exclaimed that in twenty years he had almost never left New Jersey, so what did he know? Alex had looked at her as if at a child who doesn’t understand what it means to say things one will later regret, and retreated upstairs. He did not speak to her for three days, their sullen meals spent communicating through Max and his grandparents, and Maya never said that again.

Was this acceptable to discuss with an eight-year-old? Maya laughed at herself and rehearsed her to-do list: Max needed a ride to Oliver’s on Saturday, and they had to find time before the end of the month to update two of Max’s vaccines—she would have to pick him up from school and rush back to the hospital before that office closed at four. She sniffed at the festively mild afternoon. The briefly unfevered air grew fevered inside her all the same due to the exertion required by the hill. The sweetness in the air would not last the night.

The Kroon girl was first, swinging her arms. This was new. This was something she and Max could talk about. Today, he had decided to sit in the back, just to see how things looked from back there. Perhaps he had made some new friends; he had one friend in the world, Oliver. Maya smiled at the Kroon girl, who ignored her, and looked up expectantly at the driver, who never chatted with Maya, which made her feel snubbed though she tried to persuade herself it was because he was grave about his responsibilities. He nodded and yanked the door lever.

“Wait!” Maya shouted. She laid a soft fist into the glass. The driver looked up reproachfully and the door folded back in.

“Please don’t hit my bus,” he said.

“But where is my son?” Maya said. She heard, as always, her slight accent, like a hair under the collar. She spoke with resentment—all those times the bus driver had not acknowledged her.

“The young man was not on the bus,” the driver said.

“It’s Max,” she said.

“Not on the bus,” the driver repeated.

“But he went to school,” she opened her hands. She took in the driver’s gray T-shirt, swollen by the half globe of a gut, the blue sweatpants and brown sandals.

“Call the school?” he said. “But I’ve got to move now.” He checked the mirror for traffic.

Maya’s chest emptied out and she leaped onto the first stair of the bus. The driver looked on with astonishment.

“Children!” she yelled at the bus. The small heads poking out of the green rows gave her attention, even the ones in the back. “My son, Max. He takes this bus every day.”

They stared at her silently.

“Ma’am,” the driver said.

She swiveled to face him. “You might put on something more decent to set an example for children.” 

His head retreated slightly, and a look of sleepy alarm came over his face.

She turned back to the rows. “Does anyone on the bus know who my son is?” They gazed at her stubbornly. They were not going to give anything up and they felt pity for her.

“You know Max,” the driver called out from behind her. She felt gratitude—he knew her son’s name. Then she remembered that she had just used it. “This is his mom.”

A hand shot up from a row midway down the aisle.

“You don’t have to raise your hand,” the driver said.

“Max took another bus,” the voice came. It was a girl’s voice. Maya surged down the aisle.

“What other bus?” she demanded. The girl—unattractive, a pug nose, Maya disliked her instantly, as if she were responsible for Max’s disappearance—shrugged.

“Was it a school bus?” the driver said. “Yellow.”

“No,” the girl said.

“Town bus? With purple stripes.”

The girl nodded.

“I don’t suppose you saw the number,” the driver said.

“It stops by the flagpole.”

“That’s the 748,” he said. Maya turned toward the driver. “That one goes north,” he said. “Toward the state line.”

“What state!” she exclaimed.

“New York State,” he said. His face folded, concern rising in it like color. Until a moment before, Maya had wanted to see it, and now she did not. “I’ll radio the school.”

Maya raked her temples. She heard the rumbling of the vehicle and the silence of the children. The back of the school bus was sticking out into Brandenburg Turnpike, cars backing up as they funneled into a single line to avoid it. The driver lifted a wired receiver, which crackled like a radio between stations, and murmured into it. Some of his belly rested on the lower part of the steering wheel.

“I can’t get them,” he said, exhaling contritely. “They’re busy with buses. But I’ll get ’em. He’ll turn up.”

Things had improved between them, between her and the driver, and Maya tried to take this to mean that good things were possible and her son would return. She stared out of the open doors down at the drive, its familiar plunge suddenly malevolent and abundant with risk. Without turning back to the driver, she rushed the steps down to the ground and ran toward home, the pavement going off in her knees. Behind her she heard sounds belonging to other people in another world: the bus doors sliding shut, the brake coming off, the bus shuddering off to the next residential development, where children would be disgorged into the hands of their mothers, an unremarkable ritual made remarkable only by its failure to take place.

From the book: DON’T LET MY BABY DO RODEO by Boris Fishman. Copyright © 2016 by Boris Fishman. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru (University of Bucharest) interviews Domnica Radulescu (Washington and Lee University) about her most recent novel, Country of Red Azaleas. 

CEERES, pronounced /ˈsirēz/, is the acronym for the University of Chicago Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies. Together with the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, we are delighted to announce the launch of the CEERES of Voices Event Series, an author-centered series of readings and conversations on books from or about Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Eurasia, and the Caucasus. The books being discussed are identified in a various ways: through publishers’ contacts with the bookstore or through faculty requests to CEERES to host the author. Although we have collaborated on several activities already this academic year, it is only starting in January 2017 that our collaborations will fall under this new umbrella and be part of a named event series. Visit semcoop.com/ceeres-voices to learn more. 

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A Brief Introduction to The Sensational Past

Carolyn Purnell received her PhD from the University of Chicago. She is a history instructor, an interior design writer, and a lover of bizarre facts. Purnell discusses her first book, The Sensational Past, in conversation with Irina Ruvinsky, Monday, February 20 at the Co-op. RSVP here.

According to the eighteenth-century French writer Voltaire, oysters had two, moles had four, and other animals—men included—had five. “Some people recognize a sixth,” he stated, referring to sex, but when it came down to it, they were just plain wrong. Five is our lot, Voltaire assured his readers, and “it is impossible for us to imagine or to want more.”

Given the subtitle of this book, you may have picked up on the identity of the mysterious things that Voltaire was counting, but even if you guessed correctly—the senses—Voltaire’s claims might still seem a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Who really cares how many senses oysters have? Why does it matter that moles are blind? And while it might make kindergarten education more interesting, who nowadays would argue that sex is a sixth sense? What’s more, lest you think Voltaire’s logic stopped there, he went on to speculate about the sensory abilities of aliens. Dreaming of far-off planets and peoples, he wrote: “It’s possible that on other planets, they have senses of which we have no idea. It may be that the number of senses increases from planet to planet, and a being with innumerable and perfect senses is the ultimate goal.” To hear Voltaire talk, it seems like the truth is out there, but even Scully and Mulder from X-Files would have had their work cut out with this one.

Let’s not be too quick to dismiss Voltaire, though. Famous for his wit, satire, and highly caffeinated social interactions—he allegedly consumed about forty cups of coffee per day—Voltaire was far from being a crackpot. Nor was he rambling aimlessly about topics that were of no interest to his readers. In fact, he was riding the tide of a major conversational and intellectual trend of the day, and readers would have gobbled up his speculations with zeal. In the eighteenth century, which for this book’s purposes is the period between roughly 1690 and 1830, writing and talking about the senses were frequent practices. Authors, artists, philosophers, doctors, politicians, naturalists, and common people were fascinated by the topic, and debates about the senses, the effects of sensory experience, and the links between the mind and body filled the period’s letters, literature, and thought.

Here’s one quick but important example. Between 1751 and 1772, the writer Denis Diderot and the mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert undertook a massive project that subsequently has been considered indicative of the Enlightenment’s optimism, rationality, and innovative spirit. They chased the modest aim “to collect all the knowledge that now lies scattered over the face of the earth, to make known its general structure to the men among whom we live, and to transmit it to those who will come after us.” This exhaustive collection of knowledge, to be known as the Encyclopédie, filled seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates before all was said and done, and it featured articles written by more than 130 contributors, including Voltaire, Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all of whom you will come to learn more about in these pages. The whole project kicked off with d’Alembert’s bold assertion, “All our direct knowledge  can be reduced to  the ideas  that we  get from our senses. . . Nothing is more indisputable than the existence of our sensations.”

This respected mathematician was far from alone in his sentiments. Talk of the senses and sensation seemed to be everywhere in the long eighteenth century, popping up in every genre imaginable. As d’Alembert suggested, just about everyone seemed to agree that the senses were the key to knowledge and meaningful conversation. Novelists and poets dove headfirst into the emo- tional world of sensory feeling through the concept of sensibility, which you may know from Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility. New theories of the brain and nervous system abounded in this era, replacing older ideas of sensation and perception, and physicians were increasingly fascinated with the relation- ship between physical stimuli and mental processes. Inventors and naturalists used theories of the senses to create delightful new machines like the perfume organ. And let’s  not forget all the sensory changes that were occurring in daily life: the invention of new pigments and dyes, which radically expanded the color palette for clothes, homes, and art; the spread of new foods, spices, and drugs, thanks to larger trade networks and colonial expansion; and the creation of new perfumery techniques, fragrances, and hygienic routines. All told, the eighteenth century was a period fixated on the processes of all types of perception, making it a rich era for the people of the time and the sensory historian.

This book will delve into the sensory worlds of the eighteenth century, exposing how people in the past thought about the senses, what cultural values they attached to different sensations, the various ways that they used their senses, how they perceived new sensory experiences, and how they tried to manipulate the senses through science and medicine. Each of the ten chapters presents a different “episode” in sensory history in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. In these pages, you will encounter the tobacco enema, the fad for wearing “prince poo,” and a dinner party that took place in the belly of an iguanodon. You’ll learn why, in the 1860s, British cats were eating salted elephant meat while their owners ate rotten panther. In short, you’re going to encounter some interesting characters, quirky practices, and what might seem like deeply weird beliefs. But, as you will see, they were all completely reasonable for their time. You might even say that they made perfect sense. . .

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Thanks to @whilereadingandwalking for including our stores in such flattering company! You, too, can become a member of Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books by signing up FOR FREE! Learn more about our new membership program here to join a community of readers worldwide, show support for a historic local bookstore, and save on future reads with every purchase you make. #readwithus

My Top Five Awesome Chicago Indie Bookstores

(Ranked subjectively in order of love, which means in order of how much they calm me and make me feel at home, which is totally unfair, but this is my list.)

1. 57th Street Books / the Seminary Co-Op

@57thstreetbooks @seminarycoopbookstores | Hyde Park

The seminary co-op once lived in the basement of a literal seminary. Both of these indies are winding and warm, and you can actually buy stock in the bookstore for only $30 and get 10% off in the form of customer credit. 57th Street Books is my neighborhood bookstore; the Seminary Co-Op, my college bookstore; and both make me feel like I’m home. They’re where I get 90% of my books.

2. Open Books

@openbookstore  |  West Loop / Pilsen

Open Books is a nonprofit used bookstore that provides literacy programs for more than 5,000 K–12 kids a year that range from novel-writing to reading help. I worked two blocks away from the West Loop location all last summer, and I miss being able to go there on my lunch breaks. They have an awesome staff and host community events and book clubs, plus the books are cheap! 

3. Women and Children First

@womenandchildrenfirst  |  Andersonville

Check out the most amazing feminist bookstore in the land. It’s an amazing bookstore, packed with awesome recommendation shelves that will send your diverse reads bookshelf into overdrive. I watch their author events page like a hawk: they’ve hosted Kate Schatz, Roxane Gay, Jacqueline Woodson, Gloria Steinem, Anne Patchett, and more. 

4. The Book Cellar

@bookcellar | Logan Square

I haven’t spent as much time as I wish I had at The Book Cellar. It’s a small, cozy place off the main street of Logan Square, with both coffee and beer to satiate your thirst as you bury yourself in a book. It holds a special place in my heart because my boyfriend brought me there both last year on birthday and this year to buy a Christmas book, and because they stock my favorite beer.

5. Volumes Bookcafe

Volumes | Wicker Park

I stumbled on Volumes Bookcafe on a day when I was anxious and discovered a signed staff recommendation: All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, which was one of the most under-appreciated fantasy/sci fi releases of 2016, but which I managed to read thanks to Volumes. They had coffee and beer and insanely comfortable armchairs. I spent only about an hour there, but it’s clearly a well-curated and comfortable bookstore. 

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Measure

from pitch back to its original

quiet tangle of birchbark. Down along

the frost encased river, little stinging reeds

thresh muscle endlessly, stricken to worry and ruffle surfaces like this.

Enormous funnels of pitch a people press on, tamp the thicket’s

thickset quiet out as if a current of flame rouses deep under boats

pitch-sealed to carry them over.

Without an usher or single familiar landmark yet the pilgrim

entering woods hears pitch drip from the sphere of fixed stars.

From The Bellfounder (The Cultural Society, 2015), by Steven Toussaint. Used with permission. Steven Toussaint and Peter O'Leary read from their new work, Tue. 1/10 6pm at the Co-op. RSVP here.

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10 books that helped me write mine: A Selected Bibliography

Emily J. Lordi is the author of Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live (Bloomsbury 33⅓ series, 2016). Join Lordi, in conversation with Tara Betts, for a book talk and listening party in celebration of the first nonfiction book about Hathaway, Friday, January 13 at the Co-op. RSVP here.

Ed Pavlić, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (U of Georgia Press, 2008)

A stunning and exacting meditation on Hathaway’s interior life and the sound of his voice that showed me it was possible to write a book about him in the first place.

Mitchell L. H. Douglas, Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem (Red Hen Press, 2009)

The other Hathaway book that predates mine, Douglas’s “long-playing poem” pays tribute not only to Hathaway but also to the many people who shaped and were shaped by him.

Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Beacon, 2002)

The clarity, rigor, and grace with which Griffin approaches Holiday, from myriad perspectives—historical, cultural, personal—make this book a perpetual model.

Alex Vazquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke UP, 2013)

The book that validates my attention to seemingly minor musical details as a significant, even subversive, scholarly method.

Aaron Cohen, Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace  (Continuum, 2011)

The 33⅓ book that most influenced mine, thanks to Cohen’s attention to Franklin’s cultural context, his use of interviews, and his treatment of the live album as a work of art largely crafted in post-production.

Daphne Brooks, Jeff Buckley’s Grace (Continuum, 2005)

Another book in the 33⅓ series that inspired mine, due to the energy and unabashed love with which Brooks examines Buckley’s music, life, and legacy.

Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (Routledge, 1999) & Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press, 2013)

No work of scholarship on soul music is complete without reference to Mark Anthony Neal, who sets Hathaway’s recordings within a changing black public sphere in What the Music Said and offers a framework for apprehending his unconventional performance of black masculinity in Looking for Leroy.

Gayle Wald, It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Duke UP, 2015)

Wald’s vibrant study of Ellis Haizlip’s public television show Soul! (1968-1973) reveals the art and ideology of soul to be even richer and more complex than most prior scholarship has noted.

Toni Morrison, Sula (Knopf, 1973)

While neither a work of criticism nor a novel “about” music, Sula (published the same year as Hathaway’s Extension of a Man) is a formally innovative meditation on black community, intimacy, and melancholy that resonated with and illuminated Hathaway’s work for me.

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Selected Reading by Darby English

Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2007) and 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (New York University Press, 2007), by Robert Reid-Pharr

The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005), by Kay Ryan

Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Reaktion Books, 1992), by Michael Camille

Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (Serpent’s Tail, 2007), by Paul Gilroy

The Price of the Ticket (Out of print, included in Baldwin, Volume 1: Collected Esays, Library of America, 1998), by James Baldwin

Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human As Praxis (Duke University Press, 2014), by Katherine McKittrick

Three Artists (Three Women) - Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe (University of California Press, 1998), by Anne Middleton Wagner

The Last Resistance (Verso, 2013), by Jacqueline Rose

The Imaginary Institution of Society (MIT Press, 1997), by Cornelius Castoriadis  

Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (2007, University of Chicago Press), by Leo Steinberg

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Notables

Several authors we hosted this year (or will in 2017) are included in The New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2016, and two--Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Matthew Desmond's Evicted--made the top 10! See all 100 Notables and the Co-op's own list of Notable Books at semcoop.com/co-op-notable-books-2016.

(Pictured from left to right, top to bottom: Boris Fishman, Dan Fox, Eileen Myles, Ed Yong, Martin Seay, Colson Whitehead, Ethan Michaeli, Zadie Smith, and Matthew Desmond.)

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A Neighborhood in Chicago from a line of Gwendolyn Brooks In its last halogen hours,                        the evening forgives the alley-                                                             ways . . . wherein, Every June morning, again,                         here are new leaves, viridian.                                                             They’ll come to, Tremble toward the brightening.                         Instruments without musicians,                                                              they will play A silence, soothing last night’s                         bruised pianos and exhausted                                                              horns. For your instruction, each meager leaf,                         shaped like, more intricate than, a                                                              violin, accompanies rats and moths                         into the dawn, and a cougar,                                                              hiding, with wounded eye, a torn paw: in                         halogen night, no escape—but                                                              there’s luck, grace.

From Last Lake, by Reginald Gibbons (2016, University of Chicago Press). Reginald Gibbons and Alan Shapiro read from their new work, Thu. 12/8 6pm at the Co-op. Click to Purchase

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Follow Friday

Seminary Co-op Bookstores proudly host university press authors and events throughout the year. Stay connected with the UP community and follow a few of our visiting authors from Fall of 2016:

Neil Steinberg, author of Out of the Wreck I Rise (University of Chicago Press) 9/8/16

Timothy Garton Ash, author of Free Speech (Yale University Press) 9/22/16

Steven Pincus, author of The Heart of the Declaration, (Yale University Press) 10/3/16

William Birdthistle, author of Empire of the Fund, (Oxford University Press) 10/10/16

Lloyd Sachs, author of T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit (Texas University Press) 10/10/16

Forrest Stuart, author of Down, Our & Under Arrest (University of Chicago Press) 10/12/16

Alice Kaplan, author of Looking for “The Stranger” (University of Chicago Press) 10/19/16

Gillian Hadfield, author of Rules for a Flat World (Oxford University Press) 11/7/16

Keramet Reiter, author of 23/7 (Yale University Press) 12/1/16

Robyn Spencer, author of The Revolution Has Come (Duke University Press) 12/4/16

Reginald Gibbons, author of Last Lake (University of Chicago Press) 12/8/16

Celebrate Community during University Press Week, November 14-19, 2016. Follow along with University of California Press, University of Nebraska Press, University of Minnesota Press, and University of North Carolina Press. Learn more about University Press Week here.

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Throw Back to the Future

The Front Table newsletter, Fall 1983

“More and more, I tend to side with Epicurus when he mocks those who by attachment to their country’s interests unhesitatingly sacrifice what he calls the crown of ataraxia.”

“The Anatomy of Melancholy.— The best title ever invented. Unimportant if the book to which it is attached is more or less indigestible.”

“A book should open old wounds, even inflict new ones. A book should be a danger.” Excerpts from Drawn and Quartered, by E. M. Cioran

Celebrate Community during University Press Week, November 14-19, 2016 by taking a UPWeek Blog Tour! Today’s tour includes stops at Yale University Press, Indiana University Press, University of Michigan Press, IPR License, Columbia University Press, MIT Press, University of Toronto Press Journals, and UGA Press. Learn more about University Press Week here.

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UP Staff Spotlight: John Eklund

John Eklund’s top 25 Harvard/MIT/Yale list (1998-2016)

I’ve been a sales rep for Harvard University Press, The MIT Press and Yale University Press since 1998.  It seems impossible but I did the math: during that time I represented over 15,000 individual titles.  I’ve always loved these books in a general way, but every season there have been a scattering of personal favorites that I promoted with a little extra enthusiasm. “Books I would actually buy and read” was the way I thought about them.

I couldn’t resist an invitation from my favorite store to share my top favorites, but the execution was more challenging than I expected. As I reviewed 36 seasons worth of annotated catalogs, there were hundreds of books published by these Presses that I loved, not just a couple dozen.  I agonized over consigning some gems to “bubbling under” status.  

Another complication: some of my personal favorites have gone out of print, and I was determined to stick to recommending titles that are still easily available.  The incredible Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, which I sold in my first season, would definitely make my top ten. (Please MIT Press, bring this back!)

So here’s one rep’s playlist, books that have particularly spoken to me and with which I’ve been especially happy to be associated. You’ll notice that these are not necessarily the “important” books, the game-changers, the star academics or the media successes.  

Susan Donnelly, Marketing Director at HUP,  likes to point out the ways a season’s varied titles “speak to each other”- unintended, serendipitous conversations that reveal themselves when the books are presented in a catalog.  I was surprised to see the thematic threads in my own favorite picks as I constructed this list, books speaking to each other not just across seasons but across years, via one reader’s collection and recollections.  Here’s hoping they speak to you!

Berlin Childhood Around 1900

Walter Benjamin

Harvard May 2006

HUP editor Lindsay Waters nearly single-handedly brought Walter Benjamin to a broad English-speaking audience.  With a wealth of Benjaminiana from Harvard to choose from, this sparkling book of urban vignettes by the budding child flaneur in formation is my favorite.  And as perfect an introduction to W.B. as any.

Egg & Nest

Rosamond Purcell

Harvard October 2008

Stunning photographs of egg and nest design, and a fascinating history of the scientific value of these artful specimens.  One of the most intriguing and lovely books I’ve sold, really a revelation.

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation

Jonathan Lear

Harvard April 2008

How can a people survive when its way of life has come to an end?  How should we face the possibility that our culture might collapse?  An elegant, gorgeously written book of philosophical inquiry that takes as a starting point the wisdom of Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow Nation.  Radical hope is not the same thing as optimism.  Lear explains why the distinction is so important.

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Stephen Jay Gould

Harvard March 2002

This is a vast summing up by the legendary evolutionary biologist.  It’s a doorstop, and more scholarly than his entertaining columns in Natural History magazine (oh how we miss those!)  But this is one of the books I was most proud to represent over the past 18 years.  Gould’s visit to our sales conference to talk about the book, just months before his death, made selling it something of a mission.

Loneliness as a Way of Life

Thomas Dumm

Harvard May 2010

A quirky, sophisticated but bracingly clear, even passionate inquiry into what it means to be lonely.  Dumm weaves in philosophy, literature, drama, and memoir to show how the universal condition of loneliness shapes our struggles over public and private, and how loneliness is better accepted and even cherished than fought.

To Be the Poet

Maxine Hong Kingston

Harvard September 2002

A sweet collage of reflections on being a writer by the esteemed novelist.  I have an extra fondness for this book as I was drafted to play author escort when Maxine was in Chicago to promote the book in 2002.  It gave me a special insight into her, but also an appreciation for the work of author escorts.  (I got her to O’Hare three hours early, something the pros would never do!)

Empire

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

Harvard September 2001

Hardt & Negri helped jump start the whole genre of empire literature with their sweeping history of humanism, Marxism and globalization.  I’m always a sucker for the “where did it all go wrong” school of post-Marxist critique; this book uniquely ends on a positive note, conjuring the tentative beginnings of a possible new world order.  Their argument has held up well.

A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York

Tony Michels

Harvard April 2009

Vividly recalling a time when the immigrant working class was filled with passion for social justice and self-improvement, this is a really beautiful antidote to the stereotypical depictions of 20th century socialists as dupes and fools.  

The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s

Werner Sollors

Harvard April 2014

How the defeated Germans came to grips with their own past, elegantly related with a pastiche of diaries, photos, personal memories, and lots of surprising new history.  Sollors is a compelling writer who reminds me of Sebald- a wonderful book and not as depressing as it sounds.

A Hut of One’s Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture

Ann Cline

MIT April 1998

How primitive, rustic hut-building, which anyone can do, reveals deep theoretical truths.  It’s a small standout from my first season that evoked a lot of inexplicable affection from non-professional readers. Books that generate affection for reasons that can’t be explained- these are my favorite kinds of books.

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: the Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West

Susan Buck-Morss

MIT May 2000

Nobody has picked apart the 1989 demise of the socialist dream- one of my pet subjects- better than Susan Buck-Morss.  Reading about the failures of the last century’s utopias makes me weirdly optimistic about the prospects of the next.

Rhythm Science

Paul D. Miller

MIT March 2004

D.J. Spooky’s manifesto on the art of the mix is profound, and a highly desirable book-object.  Now that everyone is a curator and a mix-master, it seems more essential than ever.  Confession: repping this book made me feel measurably hipper, at least for a season.

How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness

Darby English

MIT August 2007

A super smart, provocative survey of contemporary African-American artists, an investigation of their working practices, and a revealing look at the surprising ways identity politics express themselves in art and art history.  Also I just really loved the title.  

Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals

Christopher Payne

MIT September 2009

One of my favorite things about Editor Roger Conover’s art lists at MIT are the taxonomies- manhole covers, surfboards, campsites, and the loving, obsessive documentation of industrial hulks by Bernd and Hilla Becher.  This book- a collection of haunting color photographs of an abandoned insane asylum- speaks to that genre but adds a layer of poignancy.  I was really moved by these images when it came out and still am.

The Missing Pieces

Henri  Lefebvre

MIT/Semiotext(e) October 2014

A strangely compelling genre-bending compendium of “what has been lost or never existed,” encompassing books, films, sculptures, paintings and other cultural artifacts across time.   Sentences flow in a relentless but oddly suggestive way, even though there is no narrative.  For example: “The novel Theodor by Robert Walser; The contents of a telephone conversation between Stalin and Pasternak after the arrest of Osip Mandelstam; The final seven meters of Kerouac’s On the Road (eaten by a dog.)”  And so on for 80 more pages.  I’m not sure why but it really gets under my skin.

The Grid Book

Hannah B. Higgins

MIT January 2009

This book took me by surprise: an ostensibly dry subject- the history and shaping power of grids- actually yields a fantastic and beautifully written panorama of art, architecture, urbanism, social history and geometry.  For awhile I couldn’t help noticing all the grids I unthinkingly inhabit, they are everywhere.  The perfect marriage of fluid, literary scholarship and surprisingly fascinating subject.

Staring Back

Chris Marker

MIT August 2007

I’m a bit obsessed with the work of filmmaker Chris Marker.  This stunning book presents 200 black and white photographs taken from 1956-2006, many documenting political struggles and each one intensely revealing.  I’ve gotten lost in the rabbit-hole of gazing at the cover image alone too many times.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Jonathan Rose

Yale July 2010

British working people of the early 20th century: what they read, how they organized to learn, what they knew.  This is an erudite, often funny and quietly powerful piece of labor and social history, a real classic.

The Craftsman

Richard Sennett

Yale March 2008

Craftsmanship is the basic human urge to do a job well for its own sake.  This is a wise and learned history of craftsmen and women by an esteemed sociologist, and a celebration of the various forms in which craftsmanship survives the 21st century reign of the marketplace and piecework mentality. It’s optimistic: you can embody a craftsman ethic even if your job entails sitting at a computer terminal or flipping burgers.  One reviewer compared Sennett to Hannah Arendt in making “an ethical call to awareness.”  

Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion & the Furies of Writing

Steven J. Zipperstein

Yale April 2009

Chicagoan Isaac Rosenfeld was Saul Bellow’s best friend, yet his writing career never approached the levels of fame Bellow enjoyed and he died young.  Zipperstein works through a small mountain of unfinished manuscripts left by Rosenfeld, and I came away thinking he deserves a much wider audience.  His passionate commitment to the idea of the writer’s life, his focus on Jewish intellectual life and the politics of post-war America, are spot on.  In a strange way Zipperstein celebrates Rosenfeld’s demons, and how he wrestled with them would surely interest writers who struggle with their own.

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century

Adina Hoffman April 2009

The story of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, and a vivid tapestry of the politics that shaped his life.  As much history, journalism and memoir as biography, Adina Hoffman is a wonderful stylist who never strays far from the central core of his life: the poems.  A reviewer called this one of the top five books you should read to understand Jewish and Arab history in Palestine.  I loved selling this book and hearing the delighted reactions of booksellers after insisting they read it.

Swedish Wooden Toys

Amy F. Ogata and Susan Weber

Yale August 2014

I know.  Yale publishes some of the most radiant and important art books in the world.  And from the thousand I’ve sold, a book about the history of Swedish wooden toys is the one to make my top 25?  Guilty.  Check it out, it’s irresistible.

Restless Valley: Revolution, Murder & Intrigue in the Heart of Central Asia

Philip Shishkin

Yale June 2013

This book was a total surprise to me- not an academic but an experienced journalist, writing about the wild recent history of the Central Asian republics most of us know nothing about.  He manages to be funny and entertaining, no small feat given the sometimes grim subject matter.  I’ve not seen a better introduction to “the –stans” than Shishkin’s book.

Pedigree: A Memoir

Patrick Modiano

Yale/Margellos August 2015

I had been practicing my French by reading Modiano for years when he won the Nobel and an English-speaking audience finally caught up with him.  He’s one of those deceptively simple writers who, like another personal obsession, Anita Brookner, are often accused of writing the same book over and over.  So what?  Yale has published several of his 30+ novels, but I was especially fond of his one work of nonfiction, Pedigree.  Not surprisingly, it reads exactly like the fiction.  The fetching circa 1973 author jacket photo is a bonus.

Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson

Barbara Ransby

Yale January 2013

Like any good 60s Lefty I know quite a bit about the heroic mid-century exploits of Paul Robeson, but I had no idea that Mrs. Robeson-Eslanda- had an equally consequential life and career.  This is biography as revelation, and you get a sense of both Eslanda’s influence on Paul’s career as well as her own amazing accomplishments as anthropologist, journalist, and civil rights activist. The international reach of these powerful leaders of the Black freedom movement is one of the most fascinating storylines.

Celebrate Community during University Press Week, November 14-19, 2016 by taking a UPWeek Blog Tour! Today’s tour includes stops at Wayne State University Press, University of Washington Press, University Press of Mississippi, University of Wisconsin Press, John Hopkins University Press, University of Chicago Press, Purdue University Press, and Princeton University Press. Learn more about University Press Week here.