Movie Theater Seats

Inês

JOÃO PEDRO VALA
You know, I’ve never met anyone quite like you before. You don’t draw the universal symbol for asking for the check, you actually sign your name on an invisible vertical paper, you trace the T’s and make that little dot on your I’s, as if someone might accuse you of fraud or something.

Tomato on tomato plant

A Tomato Behind a Glass Cage

SARAH WU
Through the glass, we watch her pour a pale yellow substance from a small white bucket. It splashes against spots of red tomatoes. She’s using urine! the alumna says excitedly. I wonder at how easily this old woman in the glass cage has become foreign. How ancient, and how strange.

Lizard perched on a piece of wood.

Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Before learning to walk / and before I’d fallen upon the wet earth / already my heart hummed in three tones. / Even when my steps were still clumsy, / I already held three consciousnesses. // Long before my baptism, / already my three nahuals were running

cover of "Civilians"

On Civilians: Victoria Kelly Interviews Jehanne Dubrow

JEHANNE DUBROW
Now we live in North Texas, hours away from the nearest shore. And yet, the massive amounts of open space—all the prairie, marsh, and plains that we have here—started to feel like another kind of vast water, another great expanse of distance and isolation.

Glass: Five Sonnets

MONIKA CASSEL
In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for everyone / —so why can’t I stop looking?

portrait of henry james

What We’re Reading: April 2025

DAVID LEHMAN
His sentences are labyrinthine, and you soon realize how little happens in a story ... Yet we keep reading, not only for the syntactical journey but for the author’s subtle understanding of the artist’s psyche—and the thousand natural and artificial shocks that flesh and brain are heir to.

Using The Common in my first-year seminars has been fun, fruitful, and helpfully startling for these classes.”

—Martha Cooley, Associate Professor of English, Adelphi University Receive classroom subscription discounts, lesson plans, and more when you TEACH THE COMMON »

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