Curated by KEI LIM
As you delve into 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
The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.
Consider not teaching, cancelling class, staying at home in bed.
Force yourself to go to campus anyway.
Remind the twelve undergraduates gathered around the seminar table that after the 2016 election, the historian Timothy Snyder published a tiny book called On Tyranny about how democracies fail and authoritarian systems thrive. Present your comments as a reminder. Recognize the pettiness of your annoyance that they haven’t heard of this book. Recognize that it may be misdirected. Understand that fist grabbing your heart as anger.
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.
I feel like the only person still sending postcards, but a pantheon of best-selling authors is taking up the practice for a good cause.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
This holiday season, you could hear from one of your favorite authors—or have them write a missive to the book nerd on your gift list—all thanks to The Common. Authors will write and send postcards in time for the holidays, which in the past have featured personal anecdotes, original poems, and even doodles, making them a perfect gift for readers.
This one-of-a-kind online auction, as featured by The Washington Post’s Book Club newsletter and BookRiot, gives book lovers around the world the opportunity to bid on handwritten, personalized postcards from their favorite writers (plus a few actors and musicians too!). The postcards make great gifts for the literature-lovers in your life. Winning bids are tax-deductible donations. Our eleventh annual Author Postcard Auction runs from November 10 to December 1.
Translated by LISA MULLENNEAUX
Photo courtesy of Archives Bouanani
This country
My country is this horizon with blank pages
where I see skeletons of broken children
wandering, begging for the light of thin wisps
of stories that might finally appease them
In hands the color of amaranth magic
they hold hippogriffs like dogs
a talisman to protect themselves from the lover
with hair braided into black shapes
By LARA ATALLAH
From Buenos Aires, Argentina
For Eduardo Rios Pulgar,
San Telmo rings through me, like an unlived memory from a distant past. All colors, linden trees, worn down buildings, from the last century and the one before it, next to towering cement. The Argentinian Peso crumbles like the Lebanese Lira. We collect its ruins at the casa de cambio, our American dollars grotesque in the face of this country’s protracted collapse. The city is angry with love. Its sidewalks echo Beirut, and a life there, long-forgotten, languishing in the rearview mirror. Everywhere I look, an almost-déjà-vu skims the walls of my mind. Buenos Aires is Beirut, is Paris, is an aubade to the lost and never found. Down by Recoleta, Haussmann buildings dot the avenues. Dregs of a time where French architects flooded the city and left their prints along its urban landscape.
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.
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
By CASEY WALKER
Twelve years ago, in waters off the Azores, my father was thrown overboard on a whale-watching skiff and my mother thought she could save him. The trip had been my mother’s dream. She hadn’t seen the islands since she was a child, visiting her grandparents. My father’s overconfidence about boating in bad weather, an unanticipated storm surge, a possibly intoxicated boat pilot—that was the tragedy of my mother’s ancestral homecoming. No bodies were ever recovered. In lieu of caskets, the funeral director set up an oversized portrait taken on my parents’ wedding day. That young couple, with expressions formally posed, was all but unrecognizable to me.
“… [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.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.