News & Events | Page 176 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Bubbles

March 15, 2017 Dispatches

When I was a kid, some of the other ten year olds on the bus taught me how to blow spit bubbles. You catch a loop of air against your bottom lip on the tip of your tongue, then roll up your tongue to blow the bubble off into the air. We had great fun wafting these dime-sized spheres over the bus seats. The bus driver wasn’t so amused. She yelled at us, then reported us to the school for “spitting on the bus.” When I got home, my mother–who was still a stay-at-home mom then, though she started working not long after–gave me a good scolding.

Review: “When Memory Comes” and “Where Memory Leads”

March 11, 2017 Reviews

Books By Saul Friedländer

Reviewed by JENNIFER EPSTEIN

Braintree

March 8, 2017 Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By: JEN JABAILEY-BLACKBURN

The Rituals With Which We Stud Our Lives: An Interview with Clare Beams

March 5, 2017 Interviews

HILARY LEICHTER interviews CLARE BEAMS

Clare Beams’s story collection We Show What We Have Learned was published by Lookout Books in October 2016, and is currently a finalist for the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review online, Willow Springs, and elsewhere, and has received special mention in Best American Short Stories 2013 and The Pushcart Prize XXXV. She was a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and the 2014 Bernard O’Keefe Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has an MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughters and husband in Pittsburgh.

Hilary Leichter spoke with Beams over email about her story “The Drop,” appearing in Issue 12 of The Common.

Hilary Leichter (HL): Where and when do you write?

Clare Beams (CB): These days, wherever and whenever I can. I have a daughter who will be four in March, and a brand-new daughter who was just born in December; my first book came out in October, and I’m teaching in a new place this term. So right now I have to pull my minutes for writing out from all the minutes of nursing and grading and trying to convince my older daughter she should eat something besides macaroni and cheese, and put on her pants. I think most of us are always fighting for those writing-minutes, in one way or another.

Amherst College Literary Festival 2017

March 2, 2017 News and Events

Event Date:

Thursday, March 2, 2017 (All day) – Saturday, March 4, 2017 (All day)

Location:

Amherst College

Amherst’s annual literary festival celebrates the College’s extraordinary literary life by bringing to campus distinguished authors and editors to share and discuss the pleasures and challenges of verbal expression—from fiction and nonfiction, to poetry and spoken-word performance.

This year’s festival features award-winning novelist Zadie Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and 2016 National Book Award Fiction Finalists Chris Bachelder and Jacqueline Woodson, among others.

The Bill

March 1, 2017 Fiction

By BIPIN AURORA

From Notes of a Mediocre Man: Stories of India and America

Ramesh Thakur had three houses—one in Defence Colony, one in R.K. Puram, and one in Malviya Nagar. But he was not happy.

“So much dusting, Chandar. I go to each house once a week. I dust, I dust. The sofas, the tables, the mantelpiece. I do not forget anything.

“But it is hard work, Chandar. It is not easy.”

But still I was happy for him. He was retired, he needed something to do. This kept him busy. He had three houses: there was security in that. He had some place to go three days a week: this kept him busy, there was security in that as well.

The Pennies of Corsicana

February 28, 2017 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

CORSICANA BRICK CO. So say the bricks, cut within an inch of their lives, and the wet leaves like beetles’ wings, caught in the cobbles. We are the bricks’ leaves, they say, under my feet.

The color of the leaves is the color of the rusty railroad spikes that I gathered in the rain. Illegally, it would seem. Property of the train company, I’m told – possessed by others.

Ask a Local: Mai Nardone, Bangkok, Thailand

February 23, 2017 Interviews

With MAI NARDONE

Your name: Mai Nardone

Current city or town: Bangkok

How long have you lived here: Fourteen years plus one this time around

February 2017 Poetry Feature

February 21, 2017 Poetry

Please welcome back TC contributors Elizabeth Hazen, Jonathan Moody, Daniel Tobin, and Honor Moore (whose poem “Song,” published in the first issue of The Common, was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2012). We’re also delighted to welcome Gerard Coletta, who is making his first appearance in The Common.

Friday Reads: February 2017

February 17, 2017 Reviews

This February, we’re busily reading new novels by three award-winning authors who will be visiting us next month for LitFest at Amherst College. If there’s a common thread for this month’s Friday Reads, it’s memory: commemorating events, friendships, departures, and failures. But it could just as easily be their outstanding quality, as we contribute to the already effusive praise these books have earned. Get reading, and then join us March 2-4 for LitFest!

Recommended:

Swing Time by Zadie Smith, The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder, and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson.