Reviews

Review: Stories From the Edge of the Sea

December 15, 2025 Reviews

Many fiction writers aspire to mastery of the short story form. From commercial offerings such as the “MasterClass” online series to college curricula, we are taught techniques to create a strong character and a plot leading to a resolution. The goal? “To uncover a single incidence or series of linked incidents, aiming to evoke a single effect or mood from the reader,” as phrased by Sughnen Yongo writing for Forbes. I’m convinced that this conventional attitude that expects singleness from the short story is selling it short.

In his latest collection Stories from the Edge of the Sea, Andrew Lam delivers work far beyond that narrow definition of the form. The settings are complex. Even a five-page story can encompass several decades of a character’s life. Though many pieces focus on a single protagonist, often the cast of characters is big enough for a multigenerational saga. Sometimes, the perspective shifts unexpectedly from one character to another across time and space, and in other stories a first-person narrator’s voice that begins a story disappears and the story continues in the third person, as though looking over the shoulder of the earlier first-person narrator. The emotional effects of these fourteen stories are layered; they leave us with no easy truths, but push us away from stable shores into the stormy seas of human experience.

What We’re Reading: December 2025

December 12, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

If you’re looking for a book to wrap your year’s reading, look no further! December recommendations from Issue 30 contributors A.J. BERMUDEZ and CASEY WALKER and Managing Editor EMILY EVERETT think back to old favorites and old memories.

What We’re Reading: November 2025

November 14, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

As you delve into our just-launched Issue 30, check out these recommendations from its contributors. JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN, TAMAS DOBOZY, and ELSA LYONS bring you three reads to cozy up with as the days grow colder.

Olga Ravn’s The Employees (translated by Martin Aitken), recommended by Issue 30 Contributor Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

What We’re Reading: September 2025

September 19, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

This month’s picks span extraordinary circumstances, yet tug at the rather ordinary, or perhaps most relatable, of emotions. AFTON MONTGOMERY recommends an investigative nonfiction book that interrogates people’s relationships to forever chemicals, VICTORIA KELLY recommends the 2024 Booker Prize Winner that abandons plot and follows a 24-hour period of astronauts orbiting Earth, and MONIKA CASSEL recommends a docupoetics collection that weaves the emotional aftermath of the Vietnam War with the defiance of women throughout history and literature.

What We’re Reading: August 2025

August 22, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

The summer months for The Common’s staff have been filled with wandering, around Western Massachusetts and beyond. Throughout this wandering, we’ve carried books which roam themselves, where relationships parallel the movements of the landscapes they traverse. Editorial Assistants BEN TAMBURRI, LUCHIK BELAU- LORBERG, and CLARA CHIU, and Applefield Fellow AIDAN COOPER recommend three novels and a poetry collection which brought them solace during these long, sweltry days.

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, recommended by David Applefield ’78 Fellow Aidan Cooper

Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand audiobooks. There’s something about the pace or the performances that irks me, or maybe it’s something about being slightly insoluble in the story, while I drive, or fold laundry, or task my hands with whatever it is that isn’t turning a page. For me, reading has always been about following and, more importantly, re-following where the words before me lead; I flip here and there, underline and annotate, and generally meander through and indulge in the language’s turns. But because this summer has been one interwoven with travel, tugged along by the two yellow lines in our potholed New England roads, I decided (betraying my brand) to put O Pioneers! by Willa Cather through my car radio.

Magic Sentences: A Review of Miss Abracadabra

August 8, 2025 Reviews

By TOM ROSS
Review by TERESE SVOBODA

My copy of Miss Abracadabra is appallingly dogeared in my attempt to mark its most exquisite parts. Although amazed to discover that this is Tom Ross’ debut novel, I am not surprised that the venerable Deep Vellum published it. Miss Abracadabra is only the second novel they’ve taken on in twelve years that’s not a translation. What magic did Miss Abracadabra conjure to convince them?

Main Character Syndrome: A Review of Stranger Than Fiction

July 21, 2025 Reviews

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

I picked up Stranger Than Fiction, Edwin Frank’s relay race through the twentieth century novel, immediately after rereading Madame Bovary, only to encounter Emma Bovary, who came into the literary world in 1856, in the first chapter.

Frank isn’t simply paying obligatory homage to Flaubert’s importance to the nineteenth-century novel. He’s pointing out the cinematic modernity of the famous agricultural fair scene which splices the full-of-himself aristocrat Rodolphe seducing Emma, the country doctor’s bored wife, with pompous local officials making speeches. He’s also showing that the nineteenth century novel, with its formidable, reality-affirming scenic machinery, was still in full flower when Fyodor Dostoevsky’s radical and baffling Notes from Underground, which Frank pegs as the first twentieth century novel, emerged barely a decade later. If the nineteenth-century novel “attempts to maintain a dynamic balance between the self and society,” the exterior world barely seems to exist for Dostoevsky’s narrator, whose mind churns through semantic and philosophical problems for much of the text. Yet, the book was anchored in reality—the political and social problems of Russia and the personal torment of its writer—in a new way.

What We’re Reading: July 2025

July 18, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

This July, ELIZABETH METZGER, NINA SEMCZUK, and SEÁN CARLSON bring you ruminations on what it feels like to return—to home, to memory, to oneself. As they make sense of their own lives through a poetry collection, novel, and essay collection, their recommendations invite us to contemplate what it means to exist within both change and stillness, and how time itself can wander and fragment.

Fanny Howe’s The Lyrics, recommended by Issue 24 Contributor Elizabeth Metzger

It’s early July, and I’m in the middle of moving back to the East Coast. Right now, a few days after the death of the poet Fanny Howe, I am reading her collection The Lyrics, on a screened porch in the late afternoon in the Berkshires, watching geese gather on a tiny red dock. I can hear the voices of parents across the pond teaching their children to fish, to let the fish go. I’m appreciating the element of air as I remember it from childhood, a sort of thickening all around me that feels wearable, welcoming, at times oppressive, a return to an old life from the other side.

Review: The South by Tash Aw

June 23, 2025 Reviews

By TASH AW
Reviewed by BRITTA STROMEYER

Book Cover: "The South a novel by Tash Aw" over a river landscape.

Readers familiar with Tash Aw know that the power of Aw’s writing lies in the intricate layering of complex themes, brought to life through nuanced characters. His latest novel, The South, the first of a four-part saga, is no exception. It is an ambitious portrayal of a family navigating profound transformation and the complexities of identity and belonging within Malaysia’s rich and challenging political context of the late 1990s.

Following his grandfather’s passing, sixteen-year-old Jay journeys southward with his family to inspect their inherited failing farm. Blighted trees and drought-stricken fields greet them upon arrival. Told in rotating third- and first-person perspectives over a few weeks, the novel introduces Jay, his mother Sui, and farm manager Fong as they grapple with identity and belonging within fractured family dynamics. The novel, both broad in its scope and delicate in its intimacy, explores the repercussions when personal lives intersect with wider societal currents. It unfolds with a quiet yet remarkable sense of pacing, each moment carefully weighted, drawing the reader deeper into the rich inner lives of its characters.

What We’re Reading: June 2025

June 20, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD and KEI LIM

This month’s recommendations depart to new and old worlds, and explore what we can bring back from them. With CHRISTOPHER AYALA’s recommendation we find ourselves among magic and aliens alike, with CHRISTY TENDING’s we return to Mussolini-era Italy, and with MARIAH RIGG’s we are brought to a climate-ravaged future. Read on to traverse these collections of stories and essays.

Cover of Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki

Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears; recommended by TC Online Contributor Christopher Ayala

I’ve taken up the habit of hitting independent bookshops wherever I travel and buying the first interesting book I see, eschewing the never-judge-a-book-by-its-cover adage and one-hundred percent judging a book by its cover. Good design suggests to me a deeper, more thoughtful curation on behalf of the press, that a book itself is an art object whose cover is a deep and personal aesthetic representing the work of the writer and the work of the press. This is exactly how I found myself in Tucson Arizona’s Antigone Books, where I was led into Verso Books’ edition of Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan.