Aidan Cooper

Podcast: Lauren Groff on “Brawler”

February 27, 2026 Audio, Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Acclaimed TC contributor LAUREN GROFF speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her new story collection, Brawler, out this month from Riverhead, and her origins as a writer at Amherst College, where The Common is based. She also discusses how a story collection comes together over many years, how working with her longtime agent Bill Clegg has shaped her work, and what she’s working on now and next. Groff’s work appears most often in The New Yorker these days, but The Common published a story of hers in Issue 01, more than 15 years ago.

I/Teh Ran

February 18, 2026 Dispatches

By SARVIN PARVIZ

woman holding a sheet in front of the mountains

Photo courtesy of the author.

Tehran, Diaspora

I moved to the U.S. for a creative writing program with a luggage full of must-haves and gifts, to survive the at-once costs with one paycheck, memorabilia from each friend and close relatives to hold, on days of unbelonging and loss, to feel the connection to the ground back to a place. The largest collection of belongings is in my phone. More than twenty thousand photos of food on the table (always more than one plate), streets of Tehran at night through the car window, wet and bright after rain, harmonious, unlike the dust and chaos of the day. My daisy covered shoes on the curb, friends singing, tapping on the table, hugging, running all the way to the top of a hill. When I moved, the photos became similar, screen shots of Facetime or Zoom calls, us in squares next to each other, our joy breaking out of the frame, heart emojis flying, everyone laughing.

Podcast: Cush Rodríguez Moz on “Future Remains”

January 30, 2026 Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Cush Rodríguez Moz

CUSH RODRÍGUEZ MOZ speaks to EMILY EVERETT about his essay “Future Remains: The Mysterious Allure of a Town in Ruins,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. The piece chronicles a trip to Villa Epecuén: once a vacation destination for the wealthy in Argentina’s golden age, now a site for disaster tourism after salt-water flooding first ruined and then preserved it. Cush discusses how the piece evolved from simple travelogue to a complex personal essay examining national and personal decline, climate and political change, and our fascination with destruction and decay.

Cush Rodríguez Moz is a journalist, writer and photographer currently based in Madrid. His investigative articles and long-form narrative pieces cover an array of themes that include environmental issues, agriculture and urbanism. His work has appeared in El Malpensante, Altäir, The New Yorker and Climática, among other outlets. He also collaborates regularly with Revista Late. He holds degrees in history, geography and journalism. Prior to Spain, he lived in Italy and Argentina.

Read Cush’s essay in The Common at thecommononline.org/future-remains-the-mysterious-allure-of-a-town-in-ruins.

Read more from Cush at linktr.ee/cush.moz, and follow him on Instagram @cush.moz.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, andMississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

November 2025 Poetry Feature: My Wallonia: Welcoming Dylan Carpenter

November 20, 2025 Poetry

By DYLAN CARPENTER

This month we bring you work by Dylan Carpenter, a poet new to our pages. Dylan also has poetry in an upcoming print issue of The Common.

Let me, for a little longer, ponder that familiar place
I remember but would not, could not, and had refused to face

Wholly as a place unto itself, instead of an idea
That concealed a recherché emotion: My Wallonia.

How do I begin? The place that I endeavor to portray
Languishes, a somnolent geography, and slips away.

How to Read Sanskrit in Morningside Heights

November 18, 2025 Fiction

By STEPHEN NARAIN

Excerpted from The Church of Mastery, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025

Or, to use some expressions which are nearest the heart of the Masters, it is necessary for the archer to become, in spite of himself, an unmoved center. Then comes the supreme and ultimate miracle: art becoming “artless,” shooting becomes not-shooting, a shooting without bow and arrow; the teacher becomes a pupil again, the Master a beginner, the end a beginning, and the beginning perfection.

—Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

Given all their invisible stresses, all their accumulated ambitions, and the narrowness of their paths, the Freedom Riders in Pursuit of Veracity agreed they needed to relax to prepare for their journey down South; relaxation is not a luxury, it is a requirement. America has a problem with Black people relaxing. Or behaving like a boss. That’s why William would spend an entire day now and again by himself like Jesus in the wilderness. He’d meander through the weirdest stacks of a downtown bookstore just to wander. Who knows what Language was destined to change you? That’s why he took up cricket with René from Port of Spain. Why he’d take Rowena out to restaurants they could not afford to order dishes he could not pronounce—spine straight, risking glares.

Translating Toward Possibility: Sarah Faux Interviews Mariam Rahmani

November 10, 2025 Interviews

Headshots of Sarah Faux and Mariam Rahmani

Sarah Faux (left) and Mariam Rahmani (right)

Friends for over a decade, MARIAM RAHMANI and SARAH FAUX have been connecting for years about their respective artistic practices. They recently spoke over Zoom for The Common: Sarah from her painting studio, and Mariam from her office in Vermont. In the following conversation, they discuss Mariam’s novel, Liquid, published earlier this year, which centers a queer Muslim woman who navigates 100 dates in one summer. They speak on how translating others’ work has served Mariam’s own voice in writing, and how messiness and uncertainty are at the heart of good literature.

Lawrence Joseph: New Poems

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By LAWRENCE JOSEPH

Ontologies

The love the love that massively seizes me,

the typewriter’s
ribbon needs replacing,

the great imperial
power game the price of oil,

a call, a response, I know you know
how precious to care is, the voice on the record on

the turntable is singing.

Late Orison

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By REBECCA FOUST

Let ours be the most boring of love stories, the happy-ending kind,
the obnoxiously-spooning-in-public kind,

the kind with a long denouement, tedious for everyone not actually
living it. This time around, let the only fireworks

Future Remains: The Mysterious Allure of a Town in Ruins

October 27, 2025 Essays, Issue 30, Issue 30 Essays

By CUSH RODRÍGUEZ MOZ

“… [C]atastrophe is not something awaiting as in the future, something that can be avoided with well-thought-out strategy. Catastrophe in (not only) its most basic ontological sense is something that always-already happened, and we, the surviving humans, are what remains …. Our normality is by definition post-apocalyptic.”

Slavoj Žižek
Apocalyptica, “From Catastrophe to Apocalypse… and Back”

Turntables coated in rust and salt.

Illuminated beneath halogen lamps and stacked on one another like the layers of a wedding cake, the vintage record players boast a thick icing of sodium chloride and iron oxide, the granularity of which almost perfectly emulates the breading of a recently fried chicken finger.

Instead of occupying a warehouse shelf, a basement box, or a landfill, these outdated music makers ended up in a museum display case as witnesses to a singular event that some would define as catastrophic, others tragic, others fascinating. The museum, installed in a train station that hasn’t housed a locomotive for decades, commemorates the flooding and destruction of the town where it is located: Villa Epecuén.

On Fifteen Years of The Common

October 27, 2025 Essays, Issue 30, Issue 30 Essays

By JENNIFER ACKER

My horse was called Emmy, short for Emerald Star. Dad’s more mature, larger mount was named Sassafras, which he shortened to Sassy. If we hadn’t taken these girls home, they’d have been shipped to the glue factory.

Aidan Cooper

Aidan Cooper

Podcast: Lauren Groff on “Brawler”

I/Teh Ran

Podcast: Cush Rodríguez Moz on “Future Remains”

November 2025 Poetry Feature: My Wallonia: Welcoming Dylan Carpenter

How to Read Sanskrit in Morningside Heights

Translating Toward Possibility: Sarah Faux Interviews Mariam Rahmani

Lawrence Joseph: New Poems

Late Orison

Future Remains: The Mysterious Allure of a Town in Ruins

On Fifteen Years of The Common

Discover the extraordinary in The Common.

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