Issue 29

Celebrating The Common in Amman, Jordan

Celebrating The Common in Amman, Jordan

June 30, 2025 , , ,

This May, contributors featured in The Common’s latest issue, Issue 29, gathered in Amman to read their work. The event was organized by HISHAM BUSTANI, guest editor of the issue’s Amman portfolio, to celebrate the portfolio’s publication by creating a space where these writers could share their pieces aloud. Having translated many of the featured pieces, ADDIE LEAK read excerpts from her work. HALEEMAH DERBASHI, author of the enigmatic essay-portrait of Amman, “Serious Attempts at Locating the City,” was interviewed about the event by the University of Jordan Radio. HUSAM MANASRAH, whose photos artfully capture the practices of various tradespeople in Amman, spoke to Aljazeera after the reading. 

Celebrating The Common in Amman, Jordan
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Podcast: Pria Anand on “The Elephant’s Child”

Podcast: Pria Anand on “The Elephant’s Child”

June 27, 2025 , , ,

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Transcript: Pria Anand Podcast.

 PRIA ANAND speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her story “The Elephant’s Child,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The piece is a vivid retelling of a Hindu myth, the origin story of the elephant-headed god Ganesh. Pria talks about the process of writing and revising many versions of this ancient myth, why she felt inspired by it, and how her literary writing intersects with her career as a neurologist. Pria also discusses her debut book, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, out this month from Simon & Schuster. The book explores how story and storytelling can illuminate the rich, complex gray areas within the science of the brain, weaving case study, history, fable, and memoir.
 

Headshot of Pria Anand next to Issue 29 cover
Podcast: Pria Anand on “The Elephant’s Child”
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Raffia Memory

Raffia Memory

May 5, 2025 , , ,

By LILY LLOYD BURKHALTER

The man’s face is gone. Gone the others circled around him in the hut, gone the clang of cowry shells (were they cowry shells?) gathered around their ankles, gone the hut. Gone the ochre-red soil on which the hut was built. All that’s left is the fabric the man, who was a chief, was wearing. The blue of it—a blue so rich it throbbed.  

Indigo doesn’t just dye a surface. It gives depth.  

Raffia Memory
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Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place 

Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place 

May 5, 2025 , , , ,

By HISHAM BUSTANI
Translated by NARIMAN YOUSSEF

Amman is not incidental. The sayl, the stream that patiently carved a path between seven hills for thousands of years, drew—as waterways often do—the din of life. It was somewhere close to here that the Ain Ghazal statues were found. ​​Nine thousand years old, captivating in their simplicity, they seem to be about to speak as you contemplate their black-tar eyes, the details of their fine features, their square torsos and solid limbs. 

 

Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place 
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Target Island

Target Island

May 5, 2025 , ,

By MARIAH RIGG

Fifty-eight years before Harrison’s granddaughter is born, the U.S. government drops a two-thousand-pound bomb on the island of Kaho‘olawe. It is 1948. On Maui, the shock from the bomb is so strong that it shatters the glass of the living room window, and Harrison, a baby still in his crib, starts wailing in time with the family mutt.

Target Island
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