Rock musician and professor Florence Dore attunes to static in her research on “resonant silences” surrounding censorship and race in modernist literature of the early 20th century and its recapitulation of institutional norms in her new book, Novel Sounds; Australian poet and philosopher Luke Fischer joins us just in time for Poetry Month to read and discuss A Personal History of Vision; and Co-op staff Mark Loeffler and Alena Jones help us see through the haze of jacket copy, otherwise known as “blurbs.” 

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Thanks for reading and listening with us on this week’s Front Table from the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago. Browse each week’s Front Table and subscribe to our free weekly email newsletter at semcoop.com for more serious books for curious readers. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” This, legend has it, was the first blurb, or brief book description, to appear in 1856 courtesy of Ralph Waldo Emerson in praise of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This week, we cover the long and short of blurbs, calling out to us from the Co-op’s Front Table, with Seminary Co-op Assistant Manager Alena Jones.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Open Stacks returns with historian Pamela Toler on women for whom battle was not a metaphor, while positing the use of story in shaping shared history. Meanwhile, feminist-vegan advocate Carol J. Adams deconstructs the narrative surrounding hamburgers and other animal sourced foods and how eating, like reading, is always political. Plus, Co-op booksellers weigh in on the glut, guilt, and glory of biting off more than most readers can chew when it comes to ARCs (aka, advance reader copies).

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Forgotten, no good, or simply on sale? Seminary Co-op Assistant Manager Alena Jones looks past the Front Table for books of great value: what remains (and why) when books of value get marked down. Browse each week’s Front Table at semcoop.com.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

From autobiography to music criticism, poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib walks the floor of the Seminary Co-op in conversation with the books that served as muses of his love letter to A Tribe Called Quest, Go Ahead in the Rain. Oral historian and civil rights activist Timuel D. Black, Jr. shares his long-awaited memoir, Sacred Ground.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week, Seminary Co-op Assistant manager Alena Jones picks up the radical feminism of Andrea Dworkin and three new translations by women of classical works by men. Browse each week’s Front Table at semcoop.com.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Poet Eileen Myles joins us in the stacks to discuss writing EVOLUTION: their new collection of essays and poems, reading in good company, and “trying so hard to be in this world.” Co-op Booksellers weigh in on the art and “gentle madness” of collecting books.

 

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

To deny our place in time is to imperil our perspective, says Marcia Bjornerud, professor of geology and author of TIMEFULNESS. This time on Open Stacks, we expand our view of the Seminary Co-op, with new looks at the Front Table, James Joyce’s time-intensive staff favorite ULYSSES, and Bjornerud’s poly-temporal thinking and reading to support the claim that, contrary to current trains of thought, time is on our side.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Unwatchable, unreadable, or merely hard to find. It all adds up on this episode of Open Stacks as excesses of art and life are on (and off) display. Uncover your eyes and ears as editors Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, and Laura Horak discuss our mediated era and contemporary modes of spectatorship in Unwatchable, and other books worth reading closely. From the front lines of the Front Table, Rachel Galvin’s News of War examines early 20th century poetry’s critical distance from cultures of war. And Co-op Manager Adam Sonderberg esteems value in books browsed and left behind.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

To accept that truth and expression can be easily conveyed is to become a ploy of dark forces, says poet, essayist, and scholar Charles Bernstein, whose “difficult” poems take on the opacity, adjacency, multiplicity and technology of language by “slipping on the banana of words.” Picking up where our conversation in the stacks of the Co-op leaves off, James Bridle calls for new metaphors and questions to guide us through our new Dark Age of information.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

It’s that most wonderful time of the year and our booksellers and books are here to help, surprise, challenge, and delight every reader on your list. From Biography to Cooking (of a sort), indulge in books worth giving and lives worth living, with Imani Perry on the radiant and radical life of playwright Lorraine Hansberry; Norman C. Ellstrand on the romance of plants and your food; and Co-op Booksellers’ Top 5 favorite books of 2018.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

A bookstore is more than a retail space, and on this episode of Open Stacks we welcome back old friends and longtime members of the Co-op for a celebration of community committed to a sense of time and conversation spoken across the ages. Poet David Ferry goes in search of a communal voice in his landmark translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid; peace activist and Indologist David Shulman walks us through the West Bank in Palestine, retracing the “ambiguous grounds for action,” freedom, and despair in territories that can’t seem to coexist; and Hyde Park’s own Michelle Obama returns to the Co-op to kickoff her tour for Becoming. 

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Our journey into other worlds continues on this episode of Open Stacks in preparation for the after and before-lives of great books, with lions, bears, and very hungry caterpillars (oh my!) that makeup and reveal the environmental wisdom of children’s literature in scientist and poet Liam Heneghan’s Beasts at Bedtime. Then eavesdrop on the great indoors of the neighborhood bookstore, with educator and activist Bill Ayers and Co-op Booksellers on Shaun Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This episode, an interview with fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, Penguin Book of Hell editor Scott G. Bruce shares hell tales and lessons, and former Co-op Inventory Manager Conor Bean walks us through his reading list for confronting fearful times.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Just before the fantastic Epic Reads Meet-Up this past September at 57th Street Books, we sat down with celebrated YA author Kristen Ciccarelli and our own (National Book Award finalist) Franny Billingsley, who mentored Kristen through the completion of her first novel, The Last Namsara. And it was their first time meeting face-to-face! From why fantasy is an empowering genre to where writers choose to work (hint: bookstores are always close at hand), you can listen in on the conversation right here. Stop by to pick up a signed copy of Ciccarelli’s newest book, The Caged Queen, and receive a free Epic Reads tote bag (while supplies last)!

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

A trick-or-treat special: Penguin Book of Hell editor Scott Bruce tells a hell tale. Hear more from him, along with Jack Zipes and Conor Bean in our next episode of Open Stacks, out November 11.

Music: Zombie Lovesong by Apache Tomcat

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Elastic thinking, says theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow, isn’t about following but inventing rules, trading analytic for elastic thought, in order to adapt in an endlessly dynamic world, with non-linear approaches to life and work together. On this episode of Open Stacks, we pave new roads not taken, trajectories informed by social practice, social pressure, and the self at one remove, in conversations with Mlodinow on Elastic; art critic and historian Martin Patrick on books that stretched his notion of performance and identity in Across the Art/Life Divide; and booksellers on Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s life-changing novel, Motherhood.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Tricky narrators and learning spaces: Pulitzer Prize winning author Andrew Sean Greer takes listeners through a break up with an excerpt from Less, University of Chicago professor Malynne Sterstein parses Nabokov’s Pnin, and Co-op booksellers recount some of their favorite campus novels (with expanded takes on the genre).

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

Open Stacks returns from summer break with fresh ears and shelf-browsings: Peter Coviello takes a walk through the stacks, Stephen T Asma speaks on Why We Need Religion, and the Co-op’s eminent booksellers talk about Middlemarch.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week on Open Stacks, the second episode of our occasional Biblio-files series, featuring Co-op friends and legends, with professor emerita and former University of Chicago president Hanna Holborn Gray.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week on Open Stacks, we’re celebrating Chicago’s own legendary Gwendolyn Brooks on her 101st birthday.  Reginald Gibbons, Angela Jackson, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Georgia Popoff, Troy Harden, and Cheryl Clarke join us for conversations and readings about her life and legacy.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week on the program, cities shifting and shifted, and the people, institutions, and social structures that make it so. Ben Austen recounts the dissolution of Cabrini Green, America’s most iconic public housing project, on Chicago’s west side and tells a story of America’s public housing experiments and failures; LaDale C. Winling examines the role of universities on the shape of their neighborhoods and towns; and Gordon Douglas considers how DIY planning takes place, and who participates, within urban contexts.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week on Open Stacks, French lit part deux. Join us for tete-à-tetes with translators Jonathan Larson on Francis Ponge’s Nioques of the Early-Spring and Jordan Stump on Marie NDiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In, as well as University of Chicago fellow Katie Kadue on Rabelais and domestic georgics.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week, a further look at the mechanisms of incarceration. 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning professor, legal scholar, and author James Forman, Jr. discusses Locking Up Our Own and prisoners rights advocate Sarah Shourd recalls and contextualizes her own and others’ experiences in solitary confinement.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week on Open Stacks, the inaugural episode of our occasional Biblio-files series, featuring Co-op friends and legends, beginning with prolific author, esteemed anthropologist and professor, and publishing partner of the Co-op, Marshall Sahlins. 

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week on Open Stacks, lit for the little ones: it’s Children’s Book Week! Writers Javaka Steptoe and Elizabeth Acevedo join us, Colin interviews Franny, special selections from storytime, and more.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week on the podcast, we traverse the poetics of place and shared space with Andy Fitch, Miquel Àngel Llauger, Joshua Beckman, & Patrick Morrissey.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week on Open Stacks, a look at poemthings that point to the truths beyond the given names of the things contained within them, with Cecilia Vicuña and Jen Bervin.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

This week on Open Stacks, poetry and personhood. We hear a reading and conversation with Anthony Madrid and an interview with Duriel E. Harris.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.

On this week’s episode, National Book Award Winner Daniel Borzutsky, discusses his new book, Lake Michigan, with Chicago poet Nate Marshall. They also talk politics, education, violence, and the state. Then we talk with historian Robert Darnton about the revolutionary potential of poetry in 18th Century France.

This post was originally published on Open Stacks.