Graphic novel written by BESSORA and illustrated by BARROUX. Translated from the French by SARAH ARDIZZONE.
Reviewed by JULIA LICHTBLAU
In 1994, the last year my husband and I lived in Paris, a Senegalese woman named Delphine cleaned our apartment, often bringing her baby girl. At some point, she asked us to help her resolve her immigration problems. The baby was a French citizen; Delphine had come to France to work for French expats returning from Dakar and been let go some years ago.
The Common will receive its third grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2018. The Art Works grant of $10,000 will be awarded to The Common to help publish more and diverse writers, expand its readership, and also support The Common in the Classroom initiatives.
“We are thrilled to receive our third NEA grant as The Common heads into its 8th year of publication. The grant will go a long way to increase the diversity of authors and literary works published on our website and in print,” says Founder and Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker. “It will also support teachers and students who use The Common in the Classroom by expanding the library of online tools and resources.”
The Common staff and interns. Left to right, standing Debbie Wen, Flavia Martinez, Managing Editor Emily Everett, Isabel Meyers. Seated Sunna Juhn, Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker, Madeline Ruoff. Not pictured: Julia Pike, Nayereh Doosti.
In The Common office, we’re getting so excited for the work we’ll be publishing, both in print and online, in 2018. But it seems only fitting to give one last nod to the fantastic pieces that we brought out in 2017. Below is a list of our most-read pieces of the year: the poems, essays, interviews, and art that made 2017 our biggest year yet for web traffic from around the world! We hope you’ll have a look, if you haven’t already, and see why this work struck a chord with readers this year.
Three poems by ALBERTO de LACERDA, Transnational Spirit
Translations and introduction by SCOTT LAUGHLIN
“This is what I live for: friendship and the things of the spirit.” Alberto de Lacerda often repeated this refrain to his friends. Friendship meant kinship, connection, and community. The things of the spirit were poetry, literature, art, dance—the myriad expressions of the spiritual and transcendent Alberto sought, and lived by, his whole life.
Such values perhaps couldn’t lead to anything but an intercontinental life.
Buds that flower on the vanilla vines in the morning must be pollinated before dusk by human hands, or they will wilt and die and drop to the rain-mudded ground of this slash in a hillside overlooking the sea. Tobisoa, his small fingers perfect for the task, uses a toothpick to lift the rostellum, then presses the exposed anther against the stigma.
Archeological Museum, Napoli
Beard-barnacled, chokingly-fixed, almost somehow stupid, yes,
almost like will itself pushed to the extreme of its own
absence, almost like presence perpetuated so as to obliterate
personhood’s merest increments—ah, but don’t
listen to even the soundest advice you are given, never, never, no,
Graffito is sure he hears the inert face telling him, yeah,
forget pondering your person in light of pure practicalities,
and fuck letting any of the standard measures of modern
existence—money or fame, say, or so-called community, or (gasp
gasp) success—clutter the local, the cosmic
clatter of the single soul clanging the skin and organs
We agonize over breakfast choices in the towering Ferry Building food market, then walk the piers eating flaky empanadas. But it’s cold and too windy, February, so we turn inland toward North Beach. Our cousin, a local, will meet us there for lunch. He’s suggested a tour of the neighborhood’s old Beat Generation haunts.
My twin sister and I are visiting San Francisco, ostensibly to see a concert but also just to see each other, since a year ago she moved away to the suburbs of Philadelphia. For the few short days we’re here, the West Coast experiences torrential rain. LA is flooding and the Bay Area is even drizzlier than usual. Becky and I are strategic—Saturday is going to be the driest day, and we want to see everything.
Curated by SARAH WHELAN
This month, in response to a world that appears to be split across slippery fault lines, our interns are recommending books that explore cultural unity and interconnectedness. With attention to language, power, racism, and sex, these books ask the reader to reconsider her place in time as an intimate moment in a wider web of humanity.
Recommendations: Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong, The Power by Naomi Alderman, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and All the Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler.
We are pleased to announce that The Common has been chosen to receive a 2017 Amazon Literary Partnership grant. This support will specifically help The Common to continue its work publishing and celebrating new writers and diverse voices from around the world.
We are thrilled to announce that Paola Peroni’s story “Protection” from Issue 09 has been selected for the O. Henry Prize for 2017. An anthology of the winning stories, edited by Laura Furman, will be released this September from Anchor. Check out the full list of winners below, or read more on LitHub.
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