Open Stacks
by The Seminary Co-op Bookstores & UChicago Podcast Network
Open Stacks brings you conversations with scholars, poets, novelists and activists on subjects as eclectic as the books on our shelves, from under-the-radar debates in the academy to pressing contemporary social issues, and from bestselling works of fiction to avant-garde poetics. Recorded live at Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, Open Stacks invites listeners to sit in on the kind of candid discussions and lively debates made possible by the participation of readers in a public space, with the aim of expanding and encouraging a broader community of ideas. Turn up the volume, pull up a chair, and let's start a conversation.
Episodes
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Havens for the Heterodox: Seminary Co-op Director Jeff Deutsch on Good Bookstores
On this special episode of Open Stacks, we hear from Jeff Deutsch, the Director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores. Jeff's book, In Praise of Good Bookstores, came out from Princeton University Press this Spring, and Jeff has been traveling the country visiting other independent bookstores to talk...
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Meeting Again: Mikki Kendall, Jack Cella, & Colin McDonald
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. For a…
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Curiosity Is a Skill: On Reading Seriously
This time on Open Stacks, with Philip Leventhal, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, Paul Yamazaki, and Dan Wells, we ask what makes a book "serious." Booksellers Amélie, Annie, and Artemie share scholarly favorites. We're releasing this episode during University Press Week 2021, the 10th annual celebration…
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A Cave with Windows: Bookstore as Building
This time on Open Stacks: We explore the rabbit warren of the Co-op's original location in the old Chicago Theological Seminary with manager emeritus Jack Cella and veteran bookseller Katy O'Brien Weintraub, then emerge from the underground with architect Margaret McCurry, who was integral in the...
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At All Costs: Dave Eggers, Dan Wells, Ann Kjellberg, & Paul Yamazaki
On this episode, authors, publishers, editors and booksellers reflect on the value of their work, and what it takes to make a great bookstore thrive. Plus, an out-of-the-way reading list from our bookseller Mrittika: queer historical fiction... thrillers. For more from the voices you hear in this...
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What's There and What's Not: A Visit to the Front Table
On this episode of open stacks: a ghostly tour of the Co-op's Front Table, from the hauntings of american history to life (and death) advice from Spinoza. For a list of books featured in this episode, music and production credits, and more, visit our website.
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Escape Tunnel: Philip Leventhal on The Front Table
This time on Open Stacks we hear from Philip Leventhal, editor at Columbia University Press and veteran Co-opian, about the history of the famous Front Table catalog, in its print and digital forms. Then we head to the Front Table (the actual table) for some recent titles on underground...
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Place to Place: Katarzyna Bartoszyńska & Reuben Jonathan Miller
On this episode of Open Stacks with Katarzyna Bartoszyńska and Reuben Jonathan Miller, we trace paths between: academia and bookselling; Poland and Ireland; animal navigation and interpersonal knowledge; the inside and the outside of the American prison. For a complete list of books mentioned in...
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A Land Without Trees: A Visit to the Front Table
On this episode of Open Stacks, books from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow. In the middle of the Summer, a stack of Front Table books from the heart(s) of Winter. Thanks to bookseller Joey for sharing a favorite passage from Roberto Bolaño's The...
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Washing a Book: Elizabeth Branch Dyson, Eve Ewing, and Ann Kjellberg
On this episode of Open Stacks: a prismatic exploration of new releases at the Front Table, an editorial dialogue with Elizabeth Branch Dyson and Eve Ewing, and Ann Kjellberg on a life in publishing, Joseph Brodsky, and how serious books connect us to one another and the world. Elizabeth Branch...
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Common Languages: A Visit to the Front Table
On this episode of Open Stacks, a circle around the Co-op's Front Table: from a post-war pioneer of Afrofuturism on Chicago's South Side to the complex communal powers of games like spades, mahjong, and pickup soccer. Thanks to Bryce Lucas for taking us on a tour of the Front Table this time. In...
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A Spirit in the Space: On Reopening Our Doors
On this episode of Open Stacks, we celebrate the Co-op reopening its doors for in-person browsing – the first time since we closed 15 months ago. Browsers, booksellers, authors, and our own Clancey D'Isa and Bryce Lucas discuss the transfiguration of space, absence and presence, the "invisible"...
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Observer Observed: A Visit to the Front Table
In this episode, Alena takes a tour around the Front Table, guided by Bryce Lucas, manager of 57th Street Books. Circling the table, they move from bald philosophy to the physics of crumpled paper, from an Icelandic fisheries museum to the shifting nature of observation itself. Have a perspective...
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Not New in a New Way: Elizabeth Branch Dyson & Haki Madhubuti
In this first episode of the fourth season, we sit down with Elizabeth Branch Dyson, assistant editorial director and executive editor at the University of Chicago Press, to hear how she approaches acquiring widely accessible books for an academic press. Bryce (manager of 57th Street Books) takes...
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Open Stacks Returns
A new season of Open Stacks, coming soon from the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, the first not-for-profit bookstores whose mission is bookselling. This teaser features music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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Narrative Threads: Jordan Alexander Stein & Jasmon Drain
Think you know how fiction works? Think again on this episode of Open Stacks with literary theorist Jordan Alexander Stein, who joins us in the stacks for a look at When Novels Were Books. Plus, Jasmon Drain and Ben Austen discuss Drain's novelistic collection of stories about the interconnected...
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Books on Books: Craig Fehrman, Anna Kornbluh & Booksellers Off the Clock
From our nation's highest office to the uncharted territories of political formalism, we trust in books to take us in and out of the bookstore on this episode of Open Stacks, with journalist and historian Craig Fehrman on presidential authorship and literary theorist Anna Kornbluh on the future…
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Visual Memories: Berthold Hoeckner, Leila Taylor & Adam Sonderberg
On this episode of Open Stacks, Professor of Music Berthold Hoeckner spins a record of cultural memory made audible in films focused on the past, from Casablanca to Sleepless in Seattle in his book, Film, Music, Memory, as Leila Taylor turns over our shared, if buried, history of racism in…
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The Front Table: 2/13/20
In his final hours as Manager of the Seminary Co-op, Adam Sonderberg sat down to let his favorite books speak (mostly) for themselves. Join us as we reminisce on Adam's tenure at the Co-op, killing time with Kierkegaard, and coming to inhabit a world that books create on this week's Front Table...
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Picture Book
Ahead of the Oscars, Open Stacks returns with a long red carpet full of books on Hollywood, Hitchcock, Hegel and more with scholars Sharon Marcus on The Drama of Celebrity and Robert B. Pippin's Filmed Thought. Plus, re-viewing The Arcades Project and seeing Self-Help through the lens of Samuel...
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The Front Table: 1/29/20
New year. New books. New you? The Seminary Co-op's Colin and Alena search for Self-Help in the guise (and stacks) of literature, capitalist spirituality, ancient philosophy and more on this week's Front Table. Featured Books: The Self Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature by...
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Children Aren't Boats: Kim Brooks, Julissa Arce & Franny Billingsley
The pleasures of reading are often introduced at a young age, and on this episode of Open Stacks, we revisit young adulthood and the child in the 21st century, in Kim Brooks' Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear and Julissa Arce's Someone Like Me: How One Undocumented Girl Fought for Her...
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The Front Table: 12/3/19
Not all cities are created equal, and on this week's Front Table we go behind the scenes and un-seens of cities near and far, from the depths of London to the extravagant annals of Pyongyang's "model" utopias.
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Out of Season: Kathryn Scanlan & Devin Johnston
At 82, May Sarton "made a dialogue out of what had been a soliloquy," in her journal. On this entry of Open Stacks, we take the measure of our days in diaries and diaristic units of shared sense in conversations with Kathryn Scanlan and Devin Johnston. This episode was produced by Veronica Karlin...
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The Front Table: 11/19/19
A planet, a republic, a meal, and a question: what is the future of food? Specifically that which comes from animals. This week's Front Table is serving up thick cuts of scholarship on "The Meat Question" and history of our relationship to meat past, present, and beyond. This episode features...
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How to Explode Slowly: Etgar Keret, Jessica Laser & Daniel Poppick
From the depths of Moby Dick to the light of something like poetry in author Etgar Keret's new collection, Fly Already, we follow a line (or is it a fuse?) running between the past and present of contemporary literature on this episode of Open Stacks, featuring Etgar Keret, Jessica Laser, and...
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The Front Table: 11/5/19
It's a long and winding road on this week's Front Table from idea to book, career, and other forms of written livelihood. This episode of the Front Table features the voices of the Co-op's Colin McDonald and Alena Jones. It was produced by Jackson Roach, and includes music by Kevin MacLeod, and...
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World Makers: Ocean Vuong & Rebecca Clarren
Award winning poet Ocean Vuong and journalist Rebecca Clarren turn a romantic and empiric lens on the art of fiction in their acclaimed debut novels, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Kickdown, both of which plunge new emotional depths of American experience on this episode of Open Stacks.
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The Front Table: 10/21/19
Space is the place on this week's Front Table with the Seminary Co-op's Colin and Alena looking up and down at a veritable galaxy of new books about our universe and multiverse.
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Placemaking: Timothy Cresswell & Dani Shapiro
A place like the Seminary Co-op is in some sense made of writing, but what can writing make? That question is at the center of conversations with Timothy Cresswell, Dani Shapiro and others on the first episode of the third season of Open Stacks.
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The Front Table: 9/26/19
As students return to campus in pursuit of degrees, the Co-op's Colin and Alena come back to the Front Table in pursuit of knowledge in and beyond education, with a look at the higher costs and undervalues making college work... for some.
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The Front Table: 9/12/19
Feeling blue? You're not alone. Join the Seminary Co-op's Colin and Alena and for a spin around the Co-op's colorful Front Table with recent and reissued works that help mythologize, reflect, and interact with the secret lives of color on this week's Front Table podcast.
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The Front Table: 8/27/19
We may not be able to slow down our climate crisis, but we can take time to understand what's happening and why with the help of new books about environmental peril in relation to philosophical anthropology, institutional racism, and a categorical lack of imagination; something you'll never find…
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The Front Table: 8/13/19
What's wrong with rudeness? The Seminary Co-op's Colin and Alena turn to ancient ideas about etiquette and more for our ill-mannered age on this week's Front Table. Tune in for "civilized" reading wherever you listen to podcasts.
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The Front Table: 7/30/19
Fresh off inventory, the Seminary Co-op's Colin and Alena investigate the "impulse to accumulate" as qualitatively quantified in yet more new books on this week's Front Table.
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The Front Table: 7/16/19
Since medieval times, if not before, writers like Francois Villon and St. Teresa of Avila have been showing us how writing about oneself is done. Or is it? The Co-op's Colin and Alena have a look at how far we've come on this week's Front Table, with a short stack of new memoirs long in the making.
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The Front Table: 6/20/19
Summer is here, which begs the question: What is a summer read, anyway? The Co-op's Alena and Colin find shade at the Front Table for a brief look and long view at what makes a quintessential (or potential) summer read.
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"The one things happen to": Robert Launay & Noura Erakat
Taking a line from Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, we set out to read and re-imagine the Other on this week's episode of Open Stacks (our last before summer break), with Professor of Anthropology Robert Launay, who joins us in the stacks to help us think of others through the eyes of Savages,...
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The Front Table: 6/5/19
We know that the most important things in the world are beyond measure," writes Co-op Director Jeff Deutsch in his most recent annual letter to the Co-op community, "On Measure." But in our over-quantified age, the urge to justify with numbers is all around us, literally. This week, we measure up...
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Are We There Yet? Amit Chaudhuri & Evelyn Hampton
How do you get to the end when there's no where to get? Authors Evelyn Hampton and Amit Chaudhuri read and discuss fictions of anxiety, memory, autobiography, and impersonation, taking us there one sentence at a time. Booksellers Freddie and Joe chime in on Co-op staff favorites W.G. Sebald…
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The Front Table: 5/21/19
At times of uncertainty, books of anxiety abound, but the question of how to write the unknown is always in flux. Enter a state of incomprehension on this week's Front Table, with books that can help us keep sight of our fears, from life after climate change to the Isle of Sky in Virgina Woolf's…
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Exoteric Advice: Edith Hall & Helen Rosner
What might 4th century BC philosopher Aristotle and 20th century celebrity chef Julia Child have to say to each other and to us? We're in dialogue with renowned classicist Edith Hall, author of Aristotle's Way, and The New Yorker's James Beard Award-winning roving food correspondent Helen Rosner…
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The Front Table: 5/7/19
Spring is in the air and selections from the Co-op's Moms, Dads, Grads & Kids 2019 Gift Guide (https://www.semcoop.com/category/moms-dads-grads) are on the Front Table for all of your spring season's holidays and special occasions. Co-op Assistant Manager Alena Jones takes us in and beyond the...
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"Throw Out the Radio": Florence Dore, Luke Fischer + Making Sense of "Blurbs"
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...
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The Front Table: 4/23/19
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...
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Women Warriors: Pamela Toler & Carol J. Adams
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…
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The Front Table: 3/26/19
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.
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Autobiography of Song: Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib & Timuel Black
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...
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The Front Table: 3/12/19
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.
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"The opposite of an out-of-body experience": In the Stacks with Eileen Myles + The "Gentle Madness" of Collecting Books
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.
About this show
Open Stacks brings you conversations with scholars, poets, novelists and activists on subjects as eclectic as the books on our shelves, from under-the-radar debates in the academy to pressing contemporary social issues, and from bestselling works of fiction to avant-garde poetics. Recorded live at Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, Open Stacks invites listeners to sit in on the kind of candid discussions and lively debates made possible by the participation of readers in a public space, with the aim of expanding and encouraging a broader community of ideas. Turn up the volume, pull up a chair, and let's start a conversation.
Hosted by
The Seminary Co-op Bookstores & UChicago Podcast Network