Gloria
After the rain, we get slices
of the grey and yellow world
which slip through the earnest bunches of acorns
in sheets of diffuse, papery light.
Book by MARIA TERRONE
Review by SUSAN TACENT
Maria Terrone’s grandparents were among the estimated nine million people who emigrated from Italy between 1881 and 1927. While her parents were born in the United States, her connection to Italy is deep, informing her identity and experiences as much as being a lifelong New Yorker has.
Essay by HISHAM BUSTANI
English translation by ROBIN MOGER
Essay appears in the original Arabic here.
An introductory essay to Stories from Syria, a portfolio published in English by The Common and in Arabic by Akhbar Al Adab (Egypt).
Today, in the second installment of a transatlantic literary collaboration which I hope will last for many years to come, Akhbar Al Adab publishes the original Arabic texts of stories by Syrian writers whose English translations appear in a special portfolio in Issue 17 of The Common, a literary magazine based at Amherst College. The first portfolio in the series contained stories by Jordanian writers and was published in Issue 15 of The Common, which followed the collaboration’s inaugural project: an issue of the magazine (Issue 11, Spring 2016) entirely dedicated to contemporary Arabic literature in translation entitled Tajdeed (Renewal), in which editor-in-chief Jennifer Acker and I selected stories and artworks by twenty-six writers and five artists from fifteen Arabic-speaking countries, with eighteen translators bringing the work into English.
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Westmoreland, Jamaica
Scorpions, jellyfish, poisonous flowers. My orientation as a young newcomer to a Caribbean island began with a litany of how to avoid being stung or cut or poisoned or burned. At age four, I learned to shake out my shoes to check for scorpions. I learned to back away from the pink blooms of jellyfish in the water. I learned to recognize the dark, flitting form of the stingray. I learned don’t step on a sea urchin, don’t eat an ackee raw, don’t taste the milky sap of the oleander plant.
Book by AKRAM AYLISLI
Translated from Russian by KATHERINE E. YOUNG
Review by OLGA ZILBERBOURG
Contemporary books emerging from post-Soviet countries often deal with the dehumanizing effect of the region’s systems of government on its victims, seeking to trace and partially redeem the psychological and physical harm many have suffered. For understandable reasons, few authors care to look at the perpetrators, at the people who committed murders and mass murders, informed on and denounced their neighbors. Yet, in the post-Soviet reality, often it’s these people and their descendants who have risen to the top, taken charge of the new nation states, and written their laws.
Hugo Ríos Cordero’s story “Coloso” has been chosen to appear in Sonder Press’s 2019 award anthology The Best Small Fictions. The anthology, now in its fifth year, presents one hundred and forty-six pristinely crafted pieces from an array of authors representing twenty-six nations and six continents. It features micro fiction, flash fiction, haibun stories and prose poetry. Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works says, “Brilliant, incendiary, incandescent, these tiny stories capture worlds both intimate and universal. Give this book to anyone who says flash fiction doesn’t go deep. This newest volume of Best Small Fictions demonstrates once and for all that flash fiction writers are the Ginger Rogers of the literary world, accomplishing all that novelists and short story writers do, only backwards and in high heels.”
Congrats to Hugo! Read “Coloso” here, or check out his other piece for The Common, “Tonight, the Wind,” from our Issue 16 portfolio of work about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
Browse more of The Common’s prize-winning pieces here.
Welcoming poet J.J. STARR to our pages.
Contents
With MIRIAM SAGAN
Your name: Miriam Sagan
Current city or town: Santa Fe, New Mexico
How long have you lived here: 35 years
Three words to describe the climate: Windy high desert
Best time of year to visit? Autumn.
Curated by: SARAH WHELAN
Break a sweat with July Friday Reads as our summer staff tackles heated questions of faith, sexuality, and partisanship.
Recommendations: Home by Marilynne Robinson, Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, The Bostonians by Henry James
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